


c^. 






LITERARY LIVES 

EDITED BY 

W. ROBERTSON NICOLL 



COVENTRY PATMORE 



LITERARY LIVES 

Edited by W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD. By G. W. E. Russell. 
CARDINAL NEWMAN. By William Barry, D.D. 
JOHN BUNYAN. By W. Hale White. 
COVENTRY PATMORE. By Edmxmd Gosse. 

IN PREPARATION 

CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By Clement K. Shorter. 
R. H. HUTTON. By W. Robertson Nicoll. 
GOETHE. By Edward Dowden. 
HAZLITT. By Louise Imogen Guiney. 

Each Volume , Illustrated , $i . oo net . Postage lo cts . 




The Draycoit G,i/.', 



Coventry Patmore. 



Xtterar^ %ivc3 



COVENTRY PATMORE 



BY 



EDMUND GOSSE 



ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1905 






LiBf^ARY of OUNf-i^iKSS 
Two Copies Kecmvt)u 

FEB 10 1905 

iii^iiiii Oc AAC No: 
COPY B. 



Copyright, 1905, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

Published, February, 1905 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

MEW YORK 



PREFACE 

The chief, and almost the only, public source 
of information about the facts of Patmore's life 
is the Memoirs and Correspondence^ in two vol- 
umes, published by Mr. Basil Champneys in 1900. 
Mr. Champneys, whose work was performed with 
admirable judgment and sympathy, was supphed 
with all the necessary documents by Mrs. Patmore, 
whose " devoted foresight during her husband's 
life, and indefatigable industry then and later," 
are cordially acknowledged by the biographer. 
This large work was not a memoir of Coventry 
Patmore alone, but of his parents, his wives, his 
deceased children, and many of his relatives. As 
a collection of documents, extremely full and 
authentic, it can never be superseded. 

The present little volume is intended to supple- 
ment the official biography on the critical side. 
Mr. Champneys dealt with the records of Pat- 
more's life, and of his surroundings. He had 
little space left in which to consider the works, 
which, indeed, could scarcely be analysed im- 
partially in a family memoir. To the character 
and to the writings of Coventry Patmore, with 
whom for many years I enjoyed the privilege of 
a close friendship, I had long given careful atten- 
tion ; and this book, although delayed in publication 



vi PREFACE 

until now, represents impressions which its author 
formed during Patmore's life or shortly after- 
wards. I have been glad to revise my record of 
facts by collation with Mr. Champneys' authorita- 
tive statements, but the opinions are my own and 
were defined long ago. In May, 1884, Patmore 
proposed to appoint me his literary executor, and 
although he presently released me from a duty 
which appeared to me better fitted to a member of 
his own communion, the idea that I might be 
called upon to give my impressions of his work 
thus became familiar to me. 

The Editor of this series has kindly allowed 
me to interpolate in this monograph certain ob- 
servations and notes which I published, soon after 
Patmore's death, in the North American Review 
and in the Contemporary Review. These impres- 
sions were very carefully recorded while they were 
quite fresh in my memory, and I could not have 
put them into another shape without impairing 
their fidelity. 

To Mrs. Meynell, who, during the latest years 
of his life, shared the intellectual confidences of 
Patmore to a deeper degree than any other friend, 
I owe my warmest thanks for the communication 
of some invaluable documents. 

E. G. 

July, 1904. 



CONTENTS 



PAGB 



Preface v 

CHAPTER I 
Early Years (i 823-1 846) I 

CHAPTER n 
Life in London (i 846-1 862) 29 

CHAPTER HI 
" The Angel in the House " 67 

CHAPTER IV 
Hampstead and Heron's Ghyll (i 862-1 870) 87 

CHAPTER V 
Last Years (i 870-1896) 115 



vlii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VI 

PAGE 

Personal Characteristics 149 

CHAPTER Vn 
Literary Position and Aims 180 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Publishers wish to ackfioivledge their indebtedness 
to Mrs. Patmore and Mr. Basil Chatnpneys for their 
kind permission to incltide tnany of the Illustratiotis. 

Coventry Patmore, from the Draycott Gallery Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE 

Emily Augusta Patmore, from a Portrait by Sir 

John E. Millais, P.R.A., 185 1 .... 16 ^ 
Coventry Patmore, from a Drawing by J. Brett, 

R.A., 1855 32 , 

Coventry Patmore, from a Photograph by G. 

Bradshaw, 1886 72 

Heron's Ghyll 96 / 

The Lodge, Lymington 128 

Coventry Patmore, from the Portrait by J. S. 

Sargent, R.A., 1894 144- 

The Mansion, Hastings 160 

Coventry Patmore, from a Sketch by J. S. Sar- 
gent, R.A., 1894 192 ''' 



CHAPTER I 

EARLY YEARS (1823-1846) 

Coventry Patmore was the grandson of a 
silversmith of Ludgate Hill, whose son, Peter 
George Patmore (178 6- 1855), adopted the pro- 
fession of letters, and was associated with Charles 
Lamb, Hazlitt, John Hamilton Reynolds and the 
minor writers of the so-called Cockney School. 
P. G. Patmore was a notorious rather than a 
distinguished author, and it is difficult to recon- 
cile the species of abhorrence with which most of 
his contemporaries regarded him, with the bold 
and pious claims to our respect which his son 
never ceased to put forward. It was a perma- 
nent annoyance to Coventry Patmore that his 
father was treated as a black sheep by his ac- 
quaintances, and he made many efforts to upset 
what he said was a malignant legend. This was 
the more honourable to his affection because the 
reputation of his father had inflicted serious injury 
on himself as a youth. Not only, when the poet 
was twenty-two, did his father suddenly disappear 



12 COVENTRY PATMORE 

to the Continent, leaving him without resources, 
but P. G. Patmore's ugly fame in respect to the 
Scott duel constantly rose before the younger man 
as an obstacle to his progress. Robert Browning 
told me that when, in 1846, at the house of Barry 
Cornwall, he asked Thackeray to let him intro- 
duce the young Coventry Patmore to him, the 
novelist boisterously refused, adding, " I won't 
touch the hand of a son of that murderer!" That 
Thackeray, in his generous way, immediately re- 
pented, acknowledging that the son was not re- 
sponsible for the father, and that he hastened 
to help the former as "a most deserving and 
clever young fellow who will be a genius some 
day," does not detract from the impression which 
the original outburst gives us of P. G. Patmore's 
being regarded as a kind of social outlaw. 

He owed this unpleasant position to peculiari- 
ties of temperament, which it is easier to-day to 
feel than to define, but mainly to his conduct 
in the too-famous duel in which John Scott, the 
editor of the London Magazine, was fatally 
wounded by Lockhart's friend Christie. Scott 
had pressed his quarrel, which was a literary one, 
upon Christie, and on both sides the seconds seem 
to have been much more bloodthirsty than their 
principals. Christie fired his first shot into the 
air, and Scott, it was thought, would have done 



EARLY YEARS 3 

the same If Patmore, who acted as Scott's second, 
had not insisted, '' You must not speak, you have 
nothing for It now but firing." Under his sec- 
ond's pressure, therefore, Scott aimed at Christie, 
who In response shot him dead. This conduct 
on Patmore's part was universally blamed, and 
Scott In dying seems to have corroborated the 
popular Impression. The fullest, Indeed the only, 
coherent account of this unhappy affair Is that 
which Is given by Mr. Lang In his Life of John 
Gibson Lockhart; the exact circumstances being 
still obscure, so far at least as Patmore's re- 
sponsibility Is concerned. But It has to be said 
that his whole attitude afterwards, — which Is of 
more real Importance to us In forming a judgment 
than his behaviour through a few heated minutes 
of crisis can be, — does not Impress us, as It cer- 
tainly did not Impress his contemporaries, with 
a sense of P. G. Patmore's delicacy or gentle- 
manly feeling. His son, however, defended him 
through thick and thin, and would not permit 
the least aspersion of his honour to pass unchal- 
lenged. It seems probable that It was In the 
capacity of father to his brilliant eldest boy that 
Peter George Patmore displayed the most at- 
tractive side of his character. He was a sym- 
pathetic, proud and ambitious parent, and an 
encourager of Coventry's genius. In our present 



4 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Inquiry we may be content frankly to record 
so much. 

In 1822, the year after the duel, Peter George 
Patmore married a Scotch lady, Eliza Robert- 
son, and the first of their four children, Coventry 
Kersey Dighton Patmore^ was born at Wood- 
ford, In Essex, on July 23, 1823. We may note, 
in passing, that the poet was of the generation 
of George Eliot, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, 
who were slightly older, and of Woolner, Huxley 
and D. G. RossettI, who were slightly younger 
than he. The childhood of Coventry Patmore 
seems to have been Irregular and free; he was 
subjected to none of the usual discipline of family 
life. His father was abetted In spoiling him by 
the grandmother, whom Coventry, In his large 
way, was wont In after years to describe as " one 
of the strongest-minded and most Intellectual 
women " he had ever met. She doted on her 
eldest grandson, and seems to have distinguished 
him from his brothers by lavishing upon him a 
peculiar fondness. He used to declare that the 
earliest sentence he spoke distinctly was " Coventry 
Is a clever fellow," repeated from his grand- 
mother's lips. From the first his own mother was 
estranged from him by this extravagant par- 
tiality of his father and his grandmother. Pat- 
more said that his mother counted for nothing 



EARLY YEARS 5 

in his early training, except as a dark figure which 
it was always wise and generally easy to evade. 
She was repellent in manner, and Mr. Basil 
Champneys records that she welcomed Coventry's 
first wife without cordiality or tact. Patmore told 
me that when his earliest volume of poems was 
published his mother neither affected any interest 
in it nor would read a page of it. She died in 
her son's house in 1 8 5 1 , the grandmother follow- 
ing at the age of ninety-three in 1853, ^^^ ^^e 
father at the age of sixty-nine in 1855. 

In constant and successful revolt against the 
sternness of his mother, and encouraged by the 
flatteries of his father and grandmother, Cov- 
entry Patmore grew up a strange child, priggish, 
enthusiastic, eccentric. His marked intellectual 
gifts gave him an easy predominance over his 
younger brothers, who were treated as if be- 
longing to a less privileged class. They were 
all lucky enough to spend a good deal of time 
in the country house of their grand-uncle, Robert 
Stevens, in Epping Forest. It must now be noted 
that our information about Patmore's doings for 
the next dozen years depends exclusively upon 
his own recollections. 

This memoir will be unsuccessful In giving 
a true picture of an extraordinary man if it does 
not cope with the apparent inconsistencies of his 



6 COVENTRY PATMORE 

temperament. It is best to say at once that 
though Coventry Patmore had a genuine pas- 
sion for truth, and was sincere and direct to an 
unusual and admirable degree, he had yet no 
historical instinct. His dates were always uncer- 
tain, and his record of incidents seldom tallied 
with the humdrum procession of facts. In the 
warm and misty atmosphere of his imagination, 
things took an exaggerated shape and a distorted 
direction. His memory amplified quantities be- 
fore they could reach his lips in words, and he 
habitually talked in a sort of guarded hyperbole. 
Doubtless this tendency to precise yet overstrained 
statement grew upon him in later years, but it 
was in these years that all his recollections of 
childhood were written down or spoken. It ought 
not to be difficult, with caution, to translate his 
anecdotes back out of Patmorese, but this has 
not always been done. For instance, when we 
are gravely told that Coventry and his brothers 
had an " amusement,'' which they Imposed upon 
themselves, which consisted of tying each other's 
hands behind their backs, closing their eyes and 
jumping into a quick-set hedge, while " he who 
bore the experience with the least flinching was 
considered the victor," our first impression Is that 
the story of the Greek boy and the fox Is at last 
outdone, and our second that the family must 



EARLY YEARS 7 

have habitually resembled a set of Heidelberg 
students fresh from* the duello. But calmer 
thoughts remind us that this Is simply a specimen 
of Patmorese, that perhaps once some such con- 
test was proposed, or even attempted, and that 
the Idea firmly Implanted Itself In the poet's mind. 
One dash of bramble across the cheek would be 
enough on which to build this structure of Spartan 
discipline. 

Guarding ourselves, therefore, against our sub- 
ject's constitutional tendency to emphasis, we 
obtain from the various records of Patmore's 
childhood an Impression, not merely interesting 
in itself, but consistent with the later history of 
the man. He displayed at a very early age some 
of the leading characteristics of his future years, 
an indomitable doggedness of will, a passion for 
books, a tendency to mystical contemplation. He 
quaintly states, in his fragment of an autobi- 
ography, that he was an Agnostic until his 
eleventh year, when he happened to open a devo- 
tional book, whereupon, he says, " it struck me 
what an exceedingly fine thing it would be If 
there really was a God." But this feeling soon 
subsided, and he seems to date his first direct 
tendency towards religion from the time when he 
was in Paris, as a lad of eighteen. Meanwhile, 
*' for some two or three years before I was fifteen 



8 COVENTRY PATMORE 

I had devoted all my spare time, with great 
assiduity, to science, especially chemistry, In which 
I made real advance. My father greatly encour- 
aged me In such studies, of which he knew some- 
thing himself, and he strained his not very abun- 
dant means to enable me to fit up a laboratory, 
with furnaces and other apparatus. I did not 
stop at repeating the experiments of others, but 
carried on original investigations, not altogether 
without results, among which was the discovery 
of a new chloride of bromine.'' That new chlo- 
ride of bromine was an impressive ornament of 
conversation in Patmore's later years, and was 
always received, of course, in respectful silence. 
But one would like to have had Faraday's 
opinion. 

Whether Patmore was a pioneer in chemistry 
or no, his proficiency in general science seems to 
have been remarkable. He studied mathematics, 
" until there were no properly algebraic difficulties 
which I had not overcome." A friend pronounced 
him, when he was about sixteen, " able to rank 
as a Senior Optime at the Mathematical Tripos." 
Patmore dwelt on all this because, as he said, 
" there are many persons who entertain the strange 
opinion that Ignorance of natural science Is a 
qualification for forming a right judgment In 
spiritual matters." It Is, Indeed, a strange opinion. 



EARLY YEARS 9 

since Newton and Euler are far from being the 
only great mathematicians who have cultivated 
a child-like piety. This phase in Patmore's boy- 
hood culminated in its being proposed that he 
should be sent to Cambridge, where he might have 
competed with Stokes and Cayley. But his father 
shrank from the expense of life at the University. 
Such absorption in natural science, in which the 
poet perhaps exaggerated his recollections of an 
intelligent childish pastime, seems inconsistent 
with the definite literary training to which, it is 
certain, his father began to subject him from the 
age of fourteen. " My father," he says, " did 
all he could to develop my still greater ardour 
for poetry and the best sort of prose. His own 
taste was so severely good that, at fifteen, I cared 
little for any but the classics of English literature. 
At this age I had read almost all the standard 
poetry and much of the best secular prose in our 
language, and was in the habit of studying It 
critically." To bring this statement within the 
range of credibility, however, It should be re- 
marked that the elder Patmore had a way of 
marking In pencil what he considered the very 
best passages in each writer. These, and these 
only, he commended to his son's attention, and 
Coventry, in his juvenile arrogance, took a pleas- 
ure in reading nothing which was not so marked. 



lo COVENTRY PATMORE 

This is what he means by studying poetry 
" critically " ; the better word would be " eclecti- 
cally." But the habit thus early formed of select- 
ing and appropriating only what a high standard 
of taste presented to him as the best influenced 
Patmore to the end of his life, and was a very 
important element in his intellectual training. He 
was taught to prefer a collection of specimens 
to a general system of knowledge, and his notion 
of a poetic garden became a posy of rare flowers. 
In the passage just quoted he undoubtedly over- 
estimates his acquaintance with English literature 
as a whole; he had given impassioned medita- 
tion to brilliant fragments of a multitude of au- 
thors, but there were few of which he possessed a 
complete or general knowledge. All his critical 
judgments, from first to last, bore the stamp of 
his eclecticism. 

A notable exception to his habit of selecting 
was, however, the complete study he made, as a 
boy, and constantly repeated in manhood, of the 
plays of Shakespeare. Here, also, perhaps, he 
was an eclectic, choosing Shakespeare from all 
the authors of England as the one best worthy of 
detailed consideration. His own earliest literary 
productions were two essays, the one on Macbeth, 
the other on the Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
which were published many years later, and to 



EARLY YEARS ii 

which the author was inclined to assign an ex- 
tremely early date. A letter from his father 
proves that Coventry had begun to write verses 
before he went to France in the summer of 1839, 
and from another source we know that these 
included the first drafts of ** The River," and 
*' The Woodman's Daughter." It seems certain 
that the Shakespearian essays were composed 
about the same time, and we have therefore the 
occasion to observe Coventry Patmore as a writer 
of considerable versatility and talent before he 
enters his seventeenth year. His father now sent 
him to St. Germain, in order to improve his 
French, and he stayed at this school for six 
months. But, he tells us, " as my father stipulated 
that I should have an apartment of my own, and 
should live with the headmaster's family, learn- 
ing from private tutors, and not in the classes, 
I did not mix with the other boys, nor learn to 
talk very fluently." He used to spend " all his 
Sundays " at the house in Paris of Mrs. Cath- 
erine Gore, the then highly-popular author of 
fashionable novels, ridiculed later on by Thack- 
eray. " She had a fine apartment in the Place 
Vendome, and, on Sundays, her rooms were full 
of the best literary and political society of Paris." 
Coventry Patmore was too young and too in- 
experienced to profit by the social advantages of 



12 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Mrs. Gore's probably rather flashy saloon. The 
author of Cecil: or, The Adventures of a Cox- 
comb, though the wife of a needy llfeguardsman 
and forced by her husband's poverty to pour forth 
a stream of social romances, was a personage of 
some Importance in the elder Patmore's circle of 
acquaintances. He is seen at this time to be 
solicitous that Coventry shall cultivate so impor- 
tant a friend. Mrs. Gore had an attractive 
daughter, of about eighteen, who afterwards be- 
came Lady Edward Thynne. For this girl he 
" entertained a passion of a kind not uncommon 
in youths, a passion which neither hoped nor cared 
much for a return. ... I remember praying 
more than once, with torrents of tears, that the 
young lady might be happy, especially in marriage, 
with whomsoever it might be." He was very shy, 
and Miss Gore used to snub him unmercifully. 
The incident would scarcely be notable, were it 
not that in later years Patmore always attributed 
to this "calf-love" the earliest awakening of his ap- 
prehensions of love in the peculiarly metaphysical 
form in which it afterwards appealed to him. In 
Miss Gore he worshipped the earliest of a series 
of " angels " who were the avatars, as it were, 
of his ideal. There is no doubt that at this time 
there was a remarkable development of his 
psychological powers, and that he began towards 



EARLY YEARS 13 

the end of 1839 to be in the strict sense himself, 
and no longer a mirror of the minds around him. 
He attributes to this period the assumption of 
a power " to discern sexual impurity and virginal 
purity, the one as the tangible blackness and horror 
of hell, and the other as the very bliss of heaven, 
and the flower and consummation of love between 
man and woman." If his memory of these medi- 
tations and apprehensions was correct, and it 
probably was, at the age of seventeen he had 
learned the central principles which were to guide 
the philosophy of his life. 

A Parisian phrenologist, named Deville, ex- 
amined Coventry Patmore's head, and pro- 
nounced it to be that of a poet. On his return to 
London, the youth determined seriously to culti- 
vate the art of verse, and he spent a long time 
(he says *' about a year") in polishing and 
completing the two pieces which he seems to have 
begun before he went to St. Germain. These 
were *'The River," and "The Woodman's Daugh- 
ter," which occupy together about forty pages of 
his earliest volume. His father had these poems 
set up in type, desiring him to write others and 
immediately bring out a book. But the boy's 
inclination or talent failed him. None of these 
original proofs of 1840 seem to be in existence; 
if they were, it would be interesting, and indeed 



14 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Important, to compare them with the text of the 
same lyrics in 1844, the publication of Tenny- 
son's Poems of 1842 having intervened between 
the two events. It would appear that the elder 
Patmore sent copies of the original proofs to 
several persons of critical distinction, and in par- 
ticular to Barry Cornwall, to Laman Blanchard 
and to Leigh Hunt. The latter was at this time 
a person of great authority on the Liberal side 
of the world of letters, the triumphant success of 
his Legend of Florence having at last, at the age 
of fifty-six, made him the centre of much public 
curiosity. In his benevolent way, Leigh Hunt 
was very complimentary about Coventry Pat- 
more's early poems, and the youthful poet, per- 
haps late In 1840, paid a visit to him. Nearly 
half a century later, he gave the following vivid 
account of the Incident: — 

" I set off with a letter from my father, an 
old friend of the poet. Informing him of my am- 
bition to see him. Arriving at his house, a very 
small one in a small square somewhere in the 
extreme West, after a walk of some five or six 
miles, I was Informed that the poet was at home, 
and asked to sit down until he came to me. This 
he did after I had waited In the parlour at least 
two hours, when the door was opened and a most 
picturesque gentleman, with hair flowing nearly 



EARLY YEARS 



15 



or quite to his shoulders, a beautiful velvet coat 
and a Vandyke collar of lace about a foot deep, ap- 
peared, rubbing his hands and smiling ethereally, 
and saying, without a word of preface or notice 
of my having waited so long, * This Is a beautiful 
world, Mr. Patmore ! ' I was so struck by this 
remark that It has eclipsed all memory of what 
occurred during the remainder of my visit." 

Leigh Hunt was to be a generous supporter of 
Coventry Patmore In his earliest efforts, and the 
younger man was a sincere admirer of Rimini and 
of the Indicator, In later years, he spoke of 
Leigh Hunt to Aubrey de Vere as worthy of 
honour, " a true poet and a zealous lover of 
poetry." But there was a certain flavour or per- 
fume about the literary character of Leigh Hunt 
which ultimately became highly distasteful to 
Patmore, and this, no doubt, affects with a need- 
less harshness the picturesque portrait which has 
just been quoted. 

Of the next four years we possess slight record. 
In 1842, after going through a solitary crisis of 
religious despondency which seems to have 
checked for the time being the development of 
his Intellect, the young Patmore made a visit of 
several months to some relatives In Edinburgh. 
"They were very pious members of the then new- 
born Free Kirk, and were the first religious persons 



i6 COVENTRY PATMORE 

I had ever had anything to do with. I was at first 
greatly delighted with this atmosphere, and the 
warmth with which I communicated my own aspi- 
rations much interested my new friends In me ; but 
the Inequality of my moods startled and somewhat 
shocked one of my aunts, who told me that my 
strange alternations of ardent effort and despon- 
dent Indifference reminded her of Saul." He was 
urged to make testimony of his faith, and in 
particular was desired to deliver extemporaneous 
prayer aloud, at a prayer-meeting. He was the 
shyest of youths, and we can easily Imagine " the 
agony with which, at the request of my new 
friends, I dropped on my knees In their presence, 
and remained there utterly incapable of venting 
a word, and at last rose silent, confused and 
ashamed." His Scotch relations were unceasing In 
their expressions of Protestant horror with regard 
to the Roman Faith, and Patmore was conscious 
of " a moment's attractive thought," born of their 
pious excesses, that the much abused Catholics 
might after all be possibly in the right. But this 
Immediately passed away, and did not recur for 
several years. 

Love and Religion were the two masters which 
led the spirit of Patmore through the whole of 
his earthly journey, and If we would follow the 
evolution of his character, we must not neglect 




Emily Augusta Patmore. 

From portrait by Sir John E. Millais, PR. A., 



1 851 



Reproduced from I'asil Champnej-s' "Coventry Patmore" by kind permission of 
.Messrs. Geo. Bell & Sons 



EARLY YEARS 17 

any evidence of the work of either. The follow- 
ing sonnet, then, written in 1843, ^^^ ^^^i I think, 
reprinted until now since 1844, has a biographical 
value : — 

At nine years old I was Love's willing Page : 
Poets love earlier than other men, 
And would love later, but for the prodigal pen. 

" Oh ! wherefore hast thou. Love, ceased now to engage 

Thy servitor, found true in every stage 

Of all the eleven springs gone by since then ? " 
Vain quest ! — and I no more Love's denizen, 

Sought the poor leisure of the Golden Age. 

But lately wandering, from the world apart. 

Chance brought me where, before her quiet nest, 

A village-girl was standing without art. 
My soul sprang up from its lethargic rest, 

The slack veins tightened all across my heart. 

The poet forgets that between nine years and 
twenty had occurred sixteen, when the soul's 
" lethargic rest " was broken by the image of 
Miss Gore, but the sincerity of this sonnet Is 
obvious. It was probably the latest piece com- 
posed for the volume of Poems by Coventry Pat- 
more which appeared In 1844, from the shop of 
Moxon. 

The publication of Tennyson's two volumes of 
Poems In 1842 formed a crisis in the history of 
English verse. In the presence of that new, or 



1 8 COVENTRY PATMORE 

newly observed, planet, other stars seemed in- 
significant. The circle which had begun to form 
around the boyish Patmore felt It necessary to 
assert Its allegiance; we find Laman Blanchard 
declaring that his ** strong and clear conviction 
of the extreme beauty and finish " of young 
Coventry's MS. verse was not affected by the new 
luminary; "nothing that Tennyson has done" 
need cause despair In Patmore. But the resonance 
of Tennyson's success Induced the friends of Pat- 
more to delay, and It was not until 1844, when 
the poet was just of age, that Moxon published 
the thin green volume of Poems by Coventry 
Patmore, which Is now a great biographical rarity. 
A poet's first book Is always an Important mile- 
stone In his career; the journey of life Is not the 
same after this earliest experience. This was 
peculiarly the case with Patmore, who had been 
surrounded by care and praise, daintily brought 
up In an atmosphere of cultured encouragement, 
and for whom the final disclosure to the world 
was expected to be an actual blossoming of the 
aloe. His father, with pardonable but foolish 
pride, had exaggerated the solemnity, the Im- 
portance of his son's poetic mission. The picture 
of Coventry, which Mr. Champneys has restored 
from P. G. Patmore's Chatsworth, Is mawkish 
with parental fatuity. The only phrase it con- 



EARLY YEARS 19 

tains, which possesses any value, is the following, 
in which the personal appearance of Coventry 
Patmore at the age of twenty Is preserved for 
us: — 

" See ! his lithe, fragile form Is bending over 
a book, that is spread open on his knees, his 
head drooping towards It like a plucked flower. 
The pale face Is resting on the clasped hand, over 
which, and all round the small, exquisitely mod- 
elled head, fall heavy waves of auburn hair, 
concealing all but one pale cheek — pale and cold 
as marble, but smooth and soft as a glrFs." 

The Poems of 1844, however, as we look back 
upon It across sixty years, was a volume which 
might excuse in a father a somewhat rhapsodical 
burst of language. There could be no question 
that, with strange lapses of taste and lack of 
finish, It had a real distinction of its own. It 
spoke, not in borrowed tones, but in the voice 
of a new person. The effect of the pieces has be- 
come faint; their perfume has mainly evaporated. 
But It Is easy to understand that they awakened 
hope and enthusiasm. The poet's biographers 
have dwelt upon the wild guesses which contem- 
porary reviewers made as to the source of his 
inspiration. He was accused of Imitating Leigh 
Hunt, Proctor, and Keats, but there is no trace 
of these writers upon his style. Nor Is It easy 



20 COVENTRY PATMORE 

to discover any but the most general characteristics 
of Wordsworth or even Coleridge in the texture 
or form of Patmore's early verses. One influence 
there is, and it is one which his critics have uni- 
formly, but very strangely, failed to recognize. 
All through the book he is under the spell of 
certain lyrics published by his elder contemporary, 
Elizabeth Barrett, and it is of her, and not of 
Tennyson or Coleridge, that the lad continually 
reminds us. 

To realize this influence it Is necessary to refer, 
not to the later revisions of such pieces as " Sir 
Hubert " and " The River," but to their original 
text In 1844. Miss Barrett had published In 1838 
her collection of pieces in many styles, entitled 
The Seraphim, and Other Poems. This con- 
tained, in their earliest form, some of the most 
characteristic of her lyrics, — for Instance, ** Cow- 
per's Grave," " Isobel's Child," and '' The Sleep." 
It also contained several naively psychological 
studies of sentiment, of which '' The Poet's Vow " 
is a prominent example. Coventry Patmore be- 
gan to write verses in 1839, shortly after the 
publication of The Seraphim, and the form and 
spirit of his earliest pieces is curiously and some- 
times closely coloured by his admiration for the 
new poetess. In such a poem as the following, 
even in the technical Imperfection of the second 



EARLY YEARS 11 

stanza, it is of Miss Barrett, and not of Tennyson 
or Coleridge, that the ear is reminded: — 

I knew a soft-eyed lady, from a noble foreign land ; 

Her words, I thought, were lowest when we walked out hand 

in hand. 
I began to say, "God pleasing, I shall have her for my 

bride." 
Bitter, bitter, bitter was it to me when she died. 

In the street a man since stopped me : in a noble foreign 

tongue 
He said he was a stranger, poor, and strangers all among. 
I know your thoughts, yet tell you. World, — I gave him all 

I had. 
But I — Fm much the wisest ; — it is you, O World ! that's 

mad. 

He stared upon the proffered purse ; then took it, hand and 

all. 
O ! what a look he gave me, while he kept my hand in thrall ! 
And press'd it with a gratitude that made the blushes start ; 
For I had not deserved it, and it smote me to the heart. 

The moment was one of revival in the popular 
estimate of poetry, succeeding a long obscuration. 
But the opposition of the press was still violent, 
and suspicion of both passion and simplicity in 
verse was loudly expressed in high places. The 
reviews, after twenty years, were still in doubt 
how to spell the name of Keats, and treated him, 
if they did not insult his memory, merely as a 



22 COVENTRY PATMORE 

youth of immature talent, as a kind of irreligious 
Kirke White. Browning, who had printed some 
of his finest things, and lately The Blot in the 
Scutcheon, was valued in a very small, and ap- 
parently narrowing circle. But Bailey's Festus 
had opened the doors to transcendental imagery, 
and Tennyson's lyrics to the beauty of poetic art. 
There was, nevertheless, a dominant taste for the 
purely sentimental, which was clearly and deli- 
cately fed by the verses of Richard Monckton 
Milnes, of Caroline Norton, of John Moultrie; 
and this laboured to detach into its own pensive 
province the more fiery and original forms of 
talent. It had succeeded in winning from Tenny- 
son "Dora" and "The May Queen"; it had 
threatened to lay down a law that poetry must be 
emasculated or must cease to exist. These condi- 
tions,— a fashionable sentimentality in the ascend- 
ant, with a rebellious minority eager for more 
force and flame, — prepared for each new pretend- 
ant a stirring reception from the reviews. Black- 
wood, in its ceaseless war against all that is beauti- 
ful and of good report, recognized in the poems 
of 1844 "the life into which the slime of the 
Keateses {sic) and Shelleys of former times has 
fecundated." But Leigh Hunt in public and Bul- 
wer Lytton in private praised their promise highly, 
and their merits introduced their young author to 



EARLY YEARS 



23 



Miss Barrett, to Robert Browning/ to Milnes, and 
eventually to Tennyson. 

But these introductions were preceded by an 
event which was critical in the career of Coventry 
Patmore. Scarcely had his first volume of poems 
issued from the press, than he was shocked by 
being left abruptly to his own resources. Hither- 
to, as Mr. Basil Champneys has said, Coventry 
Patmore " had been quite free from financial pres- 
sure: every whim of his had been indulged, and 
what literary work he had so far done had had 
no further object than occupation and fame." 
But P. G. Patmore had been living far beyond his 
means, had engaged in railway speculation, and 
now found it prudent towards the close of 1845, 
in company with his wife, to withdraw suddenly 
to the Continent. Coventry was in no way pre- 
pared for this revolution, nor did his parents so 
much as bid him farewell. A letter, enclosing a 
remittance, and announcing that he must not expect 

^ In an unpublished letter of July 31,1 844, Browning wrote : 
**A very interesting young poet has blushed into bloom this 
season. I send you his soul's child ; the contents were handed 
and bandied about, and Moxon was told by the knowing ones 
of the literary turf that * Patmore was safe to win. ' So Moxon 
relented from his stern purposes of publishing no more verse on 
his own account, and did publish this." T. Noon Talfourd 
welcomed the volume of 1 844 as ** a marvellous instance of 
genius anticipating time. ' * 



24 COVENTRY PATMORE 

another, was the first and only intimation of his 
father's flight that he received. For the next year 
he worked from hand to mouth at what odd lit- 
erary jobs were open to a clever but untrained 
youth. When the remittance was exhausted, as it 
soon was, verses, short articles and stray transla- 
tions brought him in about twenty-five shillings a 
week. He told me that, at his darkest hour, he 
found himself reduced to three and sixpence. 
This sum he regarded as less than nothing, and he 
therefore expended it on ices. Returning home 
without a penny, he found an envelope containing 
payment for an article he had forgotten, and his 
resources never sank quite so low again. He men- 
tioned the reckless act about the ices with a sort 
of pride which was very characteristic of him, as 
though Fate had been cowed by the insolence of 
his detachment. 

It was during these months of poverty and in- 
dependence that Coventry Patmore formed the 
most valuable friendship of his early life. Cast 
forth out of the snug nest in which paternal indul- 
gence had so long protected him, the young poet 
seems to have faced the dark streets of London, 
and the horrors of cheap lofty lodgings, with com- 
plete courage. He was sustained in this by the 
companionship of one of broader experience than 
his own, of maturer years and more commanding 



EARLY YEARS 



25 



genius. It seems to have been In the winter of 
1845, and soon after the flight of his parents to 
Paris, that Coventry Patmore met Tennyson for 
the first time. The elder poet had passed through 
great tribulation, smitten at once in fortune and in 
health. He had, however, recently been lifted out 
of these deep waters by the timely grant of a pen- 
sion of £200, which enabled him to live In modest 
comfort and even to travel a little. It enabled him 
to come up sometimes to London from Chelten- 
ham, which was then his head-quarters. He was 
still unwell and out of spirits; Patmore exagger- 
ated both his age and his disease when he saw him 
first, taking him to be a man of advanced years, 
doomed to die In a few months. As a matter of 
fact, Tennyson was but thirty-six, and his consti- 
tution was wiry and robust. He was In a neurotic 
condition, still being told by the doctor " not to 
read, not to think." He was already meditating 
the composition of a poem, half Idyl, half satire, 
which should deal with the question of female 
discipline and education. In other words, The 
Princess was beginning to take form In his mind. 
At this time, and for several years to come, 
Tennyson was scarcely seen In general company. 
He had not so completely thrown off the morbid 
melancholy which had assailed him after the col- 
lapse of Dr. Allen's undertakings in 1844 ^s to be 



a6 COVENTRY PATMORE 

willing to confront society. Indeed, it is probable 
that he was physically unfitted for it. Patmore 
told me that during the early months of their 
friendship, Tennyson often sank into a sort of 
gloomy reverie, which would fall upon him, in 
Keats' phrase — 

Sudden from heaven, like a weeping cloud, 

and put a stop to all conversation. While they 
walked the streets at night in endless perambu- 
lation, or while they sat together over a single 
meal in a suburban tavern, Tennyson's dark eyes 
would suddenly be set as those of a man who sees 
a vision, and no further sound would pass his lips, 
perhaps for an hour. These peculiarities were 
endured with patience by the younger of the two 
companions, partly because he was himself inclined 
to reverie, but particularly because his extreme ad- 
miration for Tennyson made him more than indul- 
gent. On this subject some further remarks may 
be required. 

Patmore's attitude to Tennyson in later years 
ceased to be cordial, and was at length almost de- 
fiant. The intimacy had flourished from 1845 to 
about 1852, when it began to wane; after 1856 
there was little evidence of its existence. From 
this time forward a long estrangement gradually 
developed between the poets, and with no quarrel 



EARLY YEARS 



ay 



or dispute they fell apart, and never met again. 
In the later years of his own somewhat arrogant 
independence, Patmore was vexed to think that 
he could ever have been subjugated by another 
mind as he unquestionably was by that of Tenny- 
son. His love of truth forbade him to deny the 
enslavement, but he did not love to dwell upon 
it. He said that he had wasted years in following 
Tennyson about " like a dog," and that he had 
gained nothing from the sacrifice. He used to de- 
clare that Tennyson had never really cared about 
him, but had merely accepted his companionship 
to escape from his own thoughts; that Tennyson's 
conversation had always been egotistical and use- 
less, and that Patmore, in devoting himself to his 
company, had been worshipping an empty idol. 
He would tell little innocent anecdotes of Tenny- 
son's simplicity, which he would treat as instances 
of levity. All this was Patmore at his worst, in 
the rasping mood which he too often adopted in 
the reminiscences of his old age. But in happier 
hours, when he was more genially inspired, he 
would acknowledge what an unsurpassed advan- 
tage it had been to him, as a youth of two and 
twenty, to be admitted to the confidence of that 
noble and unique spirit, and he would admit, with 
generosity, that the great dark man was not always 
wrapped in the cloak of his silent melancholy, but 



28 COVENTRY PATMORE 

that he would with equal suddenness emerge from 
the cloud, and emit glorious sparkles of thought 
about God and man, and about the divine art of 
Poetry. 

The friendship with Tennyson was at Its height 
when, In November 1846, through the interven- 
tion of Monckton Mllnes, — who had been Induced 
by Mrs. Procter to take practical Interest in Pat- 
more, — the young poet^s strain for dally bread 
was relieved by his nomination to the post of as- 
sistant In the Library of the British Museum. It 
appears that Mllnes also gave him some secretarial 
employment, and engaged him to help In the ar- 
rangement of material In the famous Life and 
Letters of Keats which appeared two years later. 
At this time Patmore was writing little or no verse, 
but was engrossed In the technical study of the art 
of poetry, and his faculties were directed rather 
to the exercise of prose. In which he had now 
found a medium in which he could express his 
ideas with ease. 



CHAPTER II 

LIFE IN LONDON (1846-1862) 

The excitement caused by the publication of his 
early poems had no sooner subsided than Patmore 
began to regard them In an almost contemptuous 
light of common sense. Escaping from the hot- 
house air In which he had been educated, brought 
face to face with the facts of life and forced to 
look at literature from a healthy standpoint, his 
earliest discovery was of the weakness of his own 
overpraised and childish verses. He told Sutton, 
In the spring of 1 847, that he was abashed at the 
thought of his foolish haste In publishing before 
his mind was matured, and added that, when all 
his friends were praising " The River " and 
" Lilian,'* and falling into ecstasies over " The 
Woodman's Daughter," he himself " was con- 
scious from the first of the defective character of 
the book." There can be no question that the 
admirable judgment of Tennyson, so happily se- 
cured In exchange for the sultry complaisance of 
the old Cockney circle, had much to do with this 
healthier condition of his spirit. 

29 



30 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Patmore was prevented at this time by a con- 
sciousness of failure from recurring to the practice 
of verse. He was greatly occupied with other In- 
terests, literary, moral and material, and he con- 
sidered that he " wanted the grand essential leisure 
for writing poetry." In saying this he was, no 
doubt, repeating a formula of Tennyson's, who 
was In the habit of justifying the aimless, dreamy 
existence which he himself led, by asserting, — and 
perhaps with truth, — that a sauntering life of 
leisure was the only one in which a poet could do 
justice to his imagination. Patmore was now 
thrilled and subdued by the genius of Emerson, 
which was then at the height of its splendour, hav- 
ing quite recently been revealed to a few first Eng- 
lish admirers. In his haste to grasp the idealism 
of Emerson, Patmore threw Coleridge to the 
winds, and It was not until much later that he re- 
turned to the earlier and the subtler master. He 
says (Feb. 15, 1847) : " I am a lover of Ralph 
Emerson. I have read all his Essays at least three 
times over." This enthusiasm did not, however, 
blind him to Emerson's Inconsistencies and illogi- 
calities, and it Is Interesting enough to see the 
youthful Patmore, as by instinct, putting his finger 
on that want of " the quality of reverence with 
regard to God," which was to be the rift In the 
lute of his admiration for the American philoso- 



LIFE IN LONDON 31 

pher. Meanwhile, the conversation of Tennyson 
and the writings of Emerson are seen to be the 
intellectual food on which Patmore builds up 
within his own soul a new man, the man with 
whom we are In the remainder of this study to 
be familiar. 

His mind was exceedingly disturbed at this 
period; "the mirror," he wrote, "though not 
cracked, I hope, Is much clouded." We may form 
an impression of his personal appearance at this 
time: very tall and thin, his small bright head 
poised lightly on his shoulders, a look of admirable 
candour in the broad forehead, prominent mobile 
lips, and sparkling eyes. These latter, doubtless, 
as we see them in Brett's admirable drawing of 
a few years later, were what gave positive charm 
to the features, — these dark, liquid, vivid eyes, 
and the silky, rolling hair. Otherwise, to a superfi- 
cial or unsympathetic observer, the Impression may 
have been of an angular young man, shy, almost 
saturnine, not ready in speech. 

At the house of Laman Blanchard, as is sup- 
posed, he met at this time a lady slightly his 
junior, the orphan daughter of the Reverend Ed- 
ward Andrews, who had been the Congregation- 
allst minister of Beresford Chapel, Wandsworth. 
Emily Augusta Andrews had just entered her 
twenty-fourth year, while Coventry Patmore was 



32 COVENTRY PATMORE 

approaching the end of his. The young lady was 
a transcendentahst; their views about Emerson 
were identical; on both sides the attraction seems 
to have been instant and complete. During a 
May-day walk on the slopes of Hampstead the 
poet proposed, and was accepted. One of the 
earliest results of this engagement was to re- 
awaken in Coventry Patmore's bosom the deter- 
mination to devote himself seriously to poetical 
composition. This impulse did not take the form, 
so common in youthful amorists, of accidental 
lyrics illustrating moods of adoration and desire, 
but it quickened in him the determination to write 
very deliberately one great work of art, which 
should exemplify and condense the whole system 
of amatory experience. Immediately after his be- 
trothal, he announced to Emily Andrews, " I have 
been meditating a poem for you, but I am deter- 
mined not to give you anything I write unless it is 
the best thing I have written. Oh, how much the 
best it ought to be, if it would do justice to its 
subject." 

Between Coventry Patmore, however, and al- 
most all other poets of high distinction in the his- 
tory of literature, there was to be this remarkable 
distinction, that while the rest have celebrated the 
liberty, the freshness and the delirium of love, 
whether in its physical or in its metaphysical sense. 



LIFE IN LONDON 33 

but always rather In the mood of anticipation than 
of possession, or, if in that of possession, at least 
in a spirit which feigns to ignore the bonds of 
custom, Patmore alone is eagerly pleased to hug 
and gild those bonds. He confesses himself not 
the poet of passion In the abstract, but of love made 
a willing captive by the marriage tie. It seems that 
he long had meditated over this theme, and that 
he entered the wedded state, not blindly and be- 
cause there was no escape from it, like most wild 
lovers, but deliberately and eagerly, as one who 
could not regard love as possible, or at least as a 
matter fit for imaginative contemplation, until it 
was legalized by the Church and the State. From 
his earliest Protestant days he had unconsciously 
regarded marriage as a sacrament, and into his 
poetical commentary there entered, from the first, 
some dim conception of a ritual. It is important 
to realize this Instinctive fact, before we meet 
with any of those arguments founded upon relig- 
ion, which, later on, Patmore employed to justify 
his view of life. 

It seems to me valuable to insist, here at the 
threshold of Coventry Patmore's life as a poet, on 
the point that his transcendental adoration of 
wedded love was originally neither a rule of 
theology nor an argument of morals, but was a 
symptom of purely individual lyricism. His no- 



34 COVENTRY PATMORE 

tion of Love in Marriage was not inculcated by 
any priestly or puritanical scruple; it represented 
no coldness or reserve, no timidity or conven- 
tionality. On the contrary, it was a fierce expres- 
sion of personal instinct. It was the peculiarity of 
Patmore's mind that the exclusively aesthetic idea 
of marriage inflamed his imagination with a noble 
excitement. He saw no difference between mar- 
riage and poetry; the one was the subject of the 
other, the second a necessary interpretation of the 
first. He prepared for both in the same solemn 
spirit which inspires the singing boys In the glor- 
ious epithalamlum of Catullus: — 

Non facilis nobis, aequales, palma parata est ; 
Adspicite, innuptae secum ut meditata requirunt. 
Non frusta meditantur : habent memorabile quod sit. 
Nee mirum : tota penitus quae mente laborent. 

There was no reason, except poverty, which 
both of them scorned, to keep Coventry Patmore 
and Emily Andrews apart. On September ii, 
1847, they were married at Hampstead, and they 
went down to Hastings for the honeymoon. More 
than thirty years later, in writing Amelia^ Pat- 
more's memory wandered back across so much 
varied experience to the emotion with which his 
first wife and he had arrived at Hastings, and how 



LIFE IN LONDON 35 

turning a dim street, 
I first beheld the ocean ; 

There, where the little, bright, surf-breathing town. 
That shew'd me first her beauty and the sea, 
Gathers its skirts against the gorse-lit down. 
And scatters gardens o'er the southern lea. 

The married life so felicitously begun was car- 
ried through its course with exquisite mutual devo- 
tion. But it closed with the death of Emily Pat- 
more in 1862, and after the lapse of more than 
forty years there are few survivors who recall her 
with distinctness. Nevertheless, no woman of her 
period stands out for us with greater definition. 
We know her to have been of most striking, and at 
the same time of most pleasing presence. Those 
who met her for the first time were amazed by her 
^* strange beauty and extreme innocence of counte- 
nance and manner." Tennyson, usually a dis- 
tracted observer, was immediately captivated by 
her " splendid " appearance combined with " so 
milk-maid-hke an absence of pretension." Ruskin 
and Carlyle were among her outspoken admirers, 
and to the young Preraphaelites her face was as 
that of a Muse. Dignity of manner, more purity 
and force than actual sweetness, great nonchalance 
in anxious and embarrassing moments, a sense of 
the pomp of matronly ceremonial which bordered 



26 COVENTRY PATMORE 

on the excessive, combined with some lack of 
humour, — these seem to be certain of the social 
characteristics of Emily Patmore when we strip 
them of the panegyrics of her dazzled admirers. 
It was admitted that her beauty ceased when 
she laughed. There were women who complained 
that she was arrogant; Mrs. Carlyle accused her 
of trying to look like Woolner's medallion of her. 
These were necessary shadows in the light of her 
beautiful presence, for even those whom she re- 
pelled admited that she was as radiant as she 
was pure and good. 

Emily Patmore became so completely her hus- 
band's Egeria and ideal that it is important for us 
to know what her appearance was. Fortunately, 
we have unrivalled opportunity of doing this, since 
three great artists, at the height of their skill, have 
preserved her beauty for us in the three spheres of 
painting, sculpture and poetry. It is given to few 
women, in the heyday of their youth, to be immor- 
talized by such a trio as John Everett Millais, 
Thomas Woolner and Robert Browning. The 
painting by Millais, done in 185 1, is a rondo, ex- 
tremely vivid in colour and finished like one of 
Holbein's small brilliant portraits at Basle. It 
represents the subject in complete full face, gazing 
out of the canvas with great brown eyes under the 
heavy curtains of her voluminous dark hair, which 



LIFE IN LONDON 37 

is drawn up In the curious Early Victorian way so 
as to hide the ears. The complexion Is trans- 
parently hectic, with that dangerous hue on the lips 
and cheeks which has more of life than life Itself 
should have. The whole candid face and hlgh- 
polsed head breathes an Indomitable earnestness 
and purity. One feels that this finely-coloured 
creature will be living all for duty and the Ideal. 
We turn to the medallion of Woolner, also a head, 
and also a rondo. This is a work In delicate low 
relief, In exact profile. Here, In the absence of 
Mlllals' gorgeous colour, we have form insisted 
on, and we gain information on new points, such 
as the bold arch of the nose, the resolution of the 
little rounded chin. The volume of the colled hair 
Is even more striking here than It was In the front 
face. In this sculpture, the beauty of hue being ab- 
stracted, the sense of positive charm is less than in 
the painting, but there is added a greater strenu- 
ousness of will, and further evidence of what peo- 
ple call " force of character." This medallion 
seems to have been modelled about the same time 
as the MlUals portrait was painted, namely late 
in 1851. 

Finally, on October 11, 1852, Robert Browning 
tried his hand at a portrait of the same remark- 
able model. The lines run thus in their origi- 
nal form: — 



38 COVENTRY PATMORE 

If one could have that little head of hers 
Painted upon a background of pale gold 

Such as the Tuscan's early art prefers ! 

No shade encroaching on the matchless mould 

Of those two lips, that should be opening soft 
In the pure profile — not as w^hen she laughs, 

For that spoils all — but rather as aloft 

Some hyacinth she loves so leaned its staff's 

Burden of honey-coloured studs to kiss 

Or capture twixt the lips, apart for this. 

Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround, 
Hovsr it should waver on the pale gold ground 

Up to the fruit-shaped perfect chin it lifts I 

Such was the external appearance of Emily 
Patmore In her brilliant youth, standing, in her 
husband's later words, 

Like a young apple tree, in flush'd array 
Of white and ruddy flower, auroral, gay, 

and so for fifteen years of unclouded felicity she 
trod in the perfection of never-falling freshness the 
path of wife and mother. She died too soon to 
have lost the mystery of youthfulness, and In her 
husband's memory she remained to the last the 
transcendent type of nuptial beauty. In the very 
shadow of her death, all he could force himself to 
think about was the adornments of her character. 
He was absorbed, at that dark moment, by the cir- 
cumstances of light Itself, brooding not upon the 



LIFE IN LONDON 39 

future but " upon all your patient, persistent good- 
ness, your absolutely flawless life, and all your ami- 
able and innocent graces." 

Never, therefore, since the beginning of the 
world, was a poet more happily situated In rela- 
tion to the personal bent of his genius than Pat- 
more was In his first married experience. He 
had formed, as we have seen, a certain exclusively 
aesthetic notion of marriage as a sacrament. He 
possessed already the Inward and spiritual sense; 
by an astonishingly good fortune, he now received 
In a perfectly harmonious wife the outward and 
visible sign of grace. He came into possession 
of what Hooker so subtly calls " God's secrets, 
discovered to none but to His own people." 
Uplifted by companionship with this stately and 
kindly creature, daily illuminated by her simplicity, 
he slowly gained, not merely what seems a very 
profound insight into the nature of womanhood, 
but the precise experience which was needed to 
make him, beyond all his peers, the consecrated 
laureate of wedded love. 

We may therefore, in this brief biography, leave 
the slight outward incidents of Patmore's career at 
this time unchronlcled and deal exclusively with 
his history as a poet, working slowly — " In frui- 
tion," as he somewhere says, " of the eternal nov- 
elty " of ideal marriage — towards as perfect an 



40 



COVENTRY PATMORE 



expression as he could obtain of those mysteries 
which are heavenly at once and human. We have 
seen that his earliest impulse was to compose for 
Emily Andrews a poem which should be worthy 
of her, but Emily Andrews had to become Emily 
Patmore before this particular poem could receive 
adequate form and substance. The first book of 
The Angel in the House took only six weeks in 
the writing, but, says the poet, " I had thought of 
little else for several years before." This state- 
ment must be accepted, of course, with reserve. It 
means that the idea of writing an authoritative 
poem in praise of the solemnities of marriage was 
always present during those years, but Patmore 
was earnestly engaged on other work, in prose as 
well as In verse. The most Important incident In 
his intellectual life at this time was, however, his 
intimacy with the Preraphaelites. 

The P.R.B., as it called Itself, was founded In 
the autumn of 1848, and early In the following 
year Thomas Woolner, the sculptor of the Brother- 
hood, then some twenty- four years of age, sought 
Patmore's acquaintance. An ardent and Impetuous 
young man, Woolner was Interested In verse-writ- 
ing as well as In modelling. He had accepted with 
avidity the reforming Ideas of his fellows, and like 
them he was deeply enthusiastic about the art of 
Tennyson. It would seem that Woolner introduced 



LIFE IN LONDON 41 

into the Preraphaelite circle Patmore's Poems of 
1844, and somewhat later (September 1849), he 
had the pleasure of presenting the poet himself, an 
honoured guest, to D. G. Rossetti, Millais and 
Holman Hunt. One of the members of the Inner 
Brotherhood has recorded that from ** 1849 to 
1853 we all saw a good deal of Mr. Patmore, and 
we all looked up to him much for his perform- 
ances in poetry, his general intellectual Insight and 
maturity, and his knowledge of important persons 
whom we came to know through him — Tennyson 
In especial." In 1851 Patmore told Millais that 
he ought to keep a diary, and the painter began one 
forthwith. It was Patmore who. In the same year. 
Induced Ruskin to take up the cudgels for the Pre- 
raphaelites and to write his famous letter about 
Millais' pictures to The Times, Rossetti speaks 
with the excitement of a boy of the help which the 
superior age and prestige of Patmore gave them 
In carrying out their designs. To Patmore himself, 
who was amused at finding youths of genius adopt- 
ing to him the attitude which he adopted to Tenny- 
son, the ardent Preraphaelites seemed " all very 
simple, pure-minded. Ignorant and confident." 

The great scheme by which the young friends 
hoped to impress their views upon a dense and 
thankless world was now approaching the hour of 
its evolution. The earliest number of The Germ: 



42 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature 
and Art, since become so famous and so rare, was 
Issued In the palest pink covers, in January 1850. 
Among slightly elder persons who favoured and 
encouraged the project, none was so prominent as 
Coventry Patmore, who Invested It with a motto 
of perfection, " It is the last rub which polishes 
the mirror." To the first number he contributed 
'* The Seasons,'' and to the February number a 
lyric In dialogue, entitled " Stars and Moon," 
which was unsigned and which he never claimed. 
This poem, however. Is not merely very character- 
istic In Its style, but It is the earliest specimen exist- 
ing of what may be called the Angel in the House 
manner. It opens thus: — 

Beneath the stars and summer moon 

A pair of wedded lovers walk. 
Upon the stars and summer moon 

They turn their happy eyes and talk : 
" Those stars, that moon, for me they shine 

With lovely, but no startling light ; 
My joy is much, but not as thine, 

A joy that fills the heart like fright," 

and It closes with the wife's exclamation : — 

" Ah, love ! we both, with longing deep, 

Love words and actions kind, which are 
More good for life than bread or sleep, 
More beautiful than Moon or Star." 



LIFE IN LONDON 43 

The direct result of Patmore's confabulations 
with Tennyson on the one hand, and with Rossetti, 
Millais and Woolner on the other, is seen In the 
volume called Tamerton Church-Tower and other 
Poems which Pickering published for him In 1853. 
Nine years had passed since the appearance of his 
first volume, and much had happened in English 
literature in the meantime. Tennyson had pub- 
lished The Princess In 1847, ^^^ ^^ Memoriam in 
1850; Robert Browning, among many other works, 
had Issued Dramatic Romances In 1846 and Christ- 
mas Eve and Easter Day In 1 850; Elizabeth Brown- 
ing had culminated, for the time being, in her Casa 
Guidi Windows of 185 1. Meanwhile, a new poet 
of the first order — a poet welcomed, by the way, in 
The Germ — had appeared in thepersonof Matthew 
Arnold with the Strayed Reveller of 1849 ^^^ the 
Empedocles on Etna of 1 852. These were the talents 
with which Coventry Patmore was called upon to 
compete, and their stimulus and audacity were 
refreshing to his spirit. He kept himself, however, 
Independent of their bias, and on his poetry of this 
period there Is scarcely any trace of contemporary 
influence. Speaking of a time from 185 1 onwards, 
Dr. Richard Garnett has recorded the subjects of 
Patmore's Intimate discourse. He was glad to con- 
verse with younger men — himself no veteran yet of 
a gravity beyond his years — of " the subordination 



44 COVENTRY PATMORE 

of parts of the whole, the necessity of every part of 
a composition being in keeping with all the others, 
the equal importance of form with matter, absolute 
truth to nature, sobriety in simile and metaphor, 
the wisdom of retaining a reserve of power — those 
and kindred maxims enforced with an emphasis 
most salutary to a young hearer just beginning to 
write In the heyday of the Spasmodic School " — 
the distracting Life-Drama of Alexander Smith, 
and, still more bewildering, the Balder of Sydney 
Dobell, being, it may be added, the poetic portents 
of this very dangerous and critical period. Mean- 
while the attention of Patmore was being given to 
the theories and practice of metrical science, and 
he was examining with great care the laws of 
verse. 

When we turn from the records of his conversa- 
tion and his reading to the actual pages of the vol- 
ume of 1853 we are unable to restrain a certain 
expression of surprise. These pieces are not, at 
first sight, what we should have expected to receive 
from so serious and so learned a student of poetic 
art. The poem which gives its name to the book 
and occupies its first fifty pages. Is a strange sort 
of Colerldgean improvisation. What we miss In 
its composition is precisely that literary finish, 
that last polish given to the mirror, of which we 
have been hearing so much. " Tamerton Church 



LIFE IN LONDON 45 

Tower " Is an experiment of the same class as so 
many which we have since been made accustomed 
to by the writers who call themselves " symbolists " 
or *' Impressionists." It bears the appearance, 
which may however be Illusory, of having been 
thrown off with extreme rapidity, and subjected to 
no revision, by a bard desirous of producing an ab- 
solutely fresh Impression. Freshness is no doubt 
what it precisely offered to Its earliest admirers, for 
there were critics who greatly admired " Tamerton 
Church Tower," and were even dazzled by it. A 
skilful experiment Is always Interesting, and nov- 
elty Is Itself a charm. Neither newness nor bold- 
ness is wanting to " Tamerton Church Tower," the 
main fault of which Is its extreme slightness. It 
Is really a record of three Impressions of travel 
on the borders of Devonshire and Cornwall. 
The poet and his friend Frank ride from North 
Tamerton (a village near Holsworthy) through 
Tavistock to Plymouth, and are caught In a thun- 
derstorm. They celebrate. In mock-heroics, the 
charms of Blanche and Bertha, whom they are 
about to marry. The curtain falls, and rises on 
the couples already married ; they go out in a boat 
on the Cornish coast, are caught by another thun- 
derstorm, are wrecked, and Mrs. Blanche Is 
drowned. The curtain falls again, and rises on the 
widower poet riding alone, accompanied by his sad 



46 COVENTRY PATMORE 

thoughts, from Plymouth through Tavistock back 
to Tamerton. 

It will be seen that the subject matter of the 
poem is exiguous in the last degree, and that its 
attractiveness depends entirely on the treatment. 
In this the influence of the Preraphaellte ideas is 
very strongly seen. Patmore writes as the young 
Mlllals painted, and sometimes he produces an 
effect precisely similar — 

In love with home, I rose and eyed 

The rainy North ; but there 
The distant hill-top, in its pride, 

Adorn'd the brilliant air ; 

And as I passM from Tavistock 

The scatter'd dwellings white, 
The church, the golden weather-cock. 

Were whelm'd in happy light. 

Dark rocks shone forth with yellow brooms ; 

And, over orchard walls, 
Gleam'd congregated apple-blooms 

In white and ruddy balls. 

The children did the good sun greet 

With song and senseless shout ; 
The lambs did skip, the dams did bleat. 

In Tavy leapt the trout. 

Across a fleeting eastern cloud 

The splendid rainbow sprang, 
And larks, invisible and loud, 

Within its zenith sang. 



LIFE IN LONDON 47 

Perhaps the most felicitous quatrains are those 
which describe '' my uncle's daughter Ruth " : — 

A maid of fullest heart she was ; 

Her spirit's lovely flame 
Nor dazzled nor surprised, because 

It always burned the same ; 

And in the heaven-lit path she trod 

Fair was the wife foreshown, 
A Mary in the house of God, 

A Martha in her own. 

This Is Wordsworthlan, but it Is followed by the 
eminently Patmorean stanza, 

Corporeal charms she had ; but these 
Were tranquil, grave and chaste. 

And all too excellent to please 
A rash, untutor'd taste. 

From the old book of 1844 were restored 
in 1853 ^'The River'' and "The Woodman's 
Daughter," which last Millais made the subject of 
an admirable painting. The metre of these early 
pieces had been criticized by Tennyson, and in 
some cases I think that his hand is to be detected in 
the actual corrections. " The Yew-Berry " Is a 
powerful study of amorous misunderstanding: — 

I call this idle history the ** Berry of the Yew ; " 
Because there's nothing sweeter than its husk of scarlet glue. 
And nothing half so bitter as its black core bitten through. 



48 COVENTRY PATMORE 

In " The Falcon " we have a lyrical rendering 
of that story of Boccaccio which Tennyson was 
long afterwards to essay to dramatize. " Eros " 
Is entirely charming; no better specimen of Pat- 
more's early manner can be quoted: 

Bright thro' the valley gallops the brooklet ; 

Over the welkin travels the cloud ; 
Touch'd by the zephyr, dances the harebell ; 

Cuckoo sits somewhere, singing so loud ; 
Swift o'er the meadows glitter the starlings, 

Striking their wings all the flock at a stroke ; 
Under the chestnuts new bees are swarming. 

Rising and falling Hke magical smoke : 
Two little children, seeing and hearing. 

Hand in hand wander, shout, laugh and sing : 
Lo, in their bosoms, wild with the marvel. 

Love, like the crocus, is come ere the Spring. 
Young men and women, noble and tender, 

Yearn for each other, faith truly plight, 
Promise to cherish, comfort and honour ; 

Vow that makes duty one with delight. 
Ah, but the glory, found in no story. 

Radiance of Eden unquench'd by the Fall, 
Few may remember, none may reveal it. 

This the First-love, the first love of all.^ 

The main value of the volume of 1853, which 
must be regarded as tentative and provisional, con- 

^ The quotations from the Tamerton Church-Tower volume 
are all given here from the first edition of 1853. Patmore 
tinkered his early verses, and not always to their advantage. 



LIFE IN LONDON 49 

sisted in Its fine realism, in its determination to see 
natural objects through eyes that were clear and 
unclouded, and in its consistent study of nuptial 
love, more and more distinctly concentrated on its 
sacramental aspect. It is therefore not difficult to 
admit that the most important numbers in the 
whole of the Tamer ton Church-Tower collection 
were "Honoria: Ladles' Praise" and "Felix: 
Love's Apology," where were presented fragments 
of the great poem, consecrated to marriage, which 
Patmore had for so many years had under con- 
sideration. It Is interesting to observe that, after 
Tennyson, Carlyle seems to have been the first to 
give full approbation to Coventry Patmore's new 
departure in emotional poetry. He found (June 
7, 1853) In the Tamerton Church-Tower volume 
" a great deal of fine poetic light, and many excel- 
lent elements of valuable human faculty." Pat- 
more seems to have chaffed him delicately on his 
supposed dislike of the vehicle of verse; Carlyle, 
surprisingly amenable, recommends the poet to 
** go on, and prosper. In what vehicle you find, after 
due thought, to be the likeliest for you." Ruskin 
thought the poems " a little too like Tennyson to 
attract attention as they should." The Brownings, 
" with old admiration for your genius " still un- 
abated, prayed for some more unmistakable mani- 
festation of It. There was a general feeling that 



50 COVENTRY PATMORE 

the volume of 1853 was experimental, and that the 
poet had something better up his sleeve. 

Such was indeed the fact, and the time was now 
fast approaching when he would submit to the 
world a first instalment, at least, of the masterpiece 
which he had been so long preparing. The evi- 
dence as to the precise date at which the great 
poem was begun is conflicting; Patmore himself, 
long afterwards, at different times, made vague and 
yet positive statements which cannot be brought 
into line with one another. He said that " the 
first book of the Angel in the House took only six 
weeks in the writing, though I had thought of little 
else for several years before." This is partly con- 
firmed by his own remarkable confession In verse, 
which cannot be too attentively noted. He 
wrote : — 

Not careless of the gift of song, 

Nor out of love with noble fame, 
I, meditating much and long 

What I should sing, how win a name, 
Considering well what theme unsung. 

What reason worth the cost of rhyme, 
Remains to loose the poet's tongue 

In these last days, the dregs of time. 
Learn that to me, though born so late, 

There does, beyond desert, befall 
(May my great fortune make me great!) 

The first of themes, sung last of all. 



LIFE IN LONDON 51 

In green and undiscovered ground, 
Yet near where many others sing, 

I have the very well-head found. 
Whence gushes the Pierian Spring. 

Here we have almost exactly the attitude of La 
Bruyere in his famous opening sentence of the 
Carac teres, — " Tout est dit, et Ton vient trop tard 
depuls plus de mllle ans qu*il y a des hommes, et 
qui pensent," — followed by the instant proof that 
to the artist practically nothing has yet been said 
of what is veritably best. It Is plain that after re- 
flecting long Patmore came to the conclusion he 
could take the primal Interests of mankind and so 
treat them as to make them appear new, that he 
might so celebrate Nuptial Love as to make even 
married lovers feel that they had never loved be- 
fore. It seems to me that immediately after his 
marriage in 1847 he made spasmodic efforts to 
start his poem, but only contrived, at that time, to 
produce the '' few astonishing Hnes " which he 
read in 1849 ^^ Rossetti, Woolner and Millals. 
The year 1850 appears to mark the date of the 
practical commencement of The Angel in the 
House. On March 21 of that year, Rossetti 
writes : — 

" [Patmore] has been occupied the last month 
with his poem on Marriage, of which, however, 
he has not meanwhile written a hne; but, having 



52 COVENTRY PATMORE 

meditated the matter, is now about to do so. He 
expresses himself quite confident of being able to 
keep it up at the same pitch as the few astonishing 
lines he has yet written." 

The poetical faculty of Coventry Patmore was 
singularly fluctuating. He was not one of those 
poets who can compose with comparative regu- 
larity, and be confident of producing a fair number 
of lines every year. His vein was extremely inter- 
mittent, and if for short periods his verse would 
flow, as Milton's did, " with a certain Impetus and 
oestrus^'' there were months and even years when 
he was unable to make a single line. But it was an 
admirable quality In his nature that he could be per- 
fectly patient. He said to me, near the close of his 
career, that he was thankful to know that he had 
never, from anxiety or vanity, spurred an unwilling 
Pegasus. So now, at the threshold of his great 
endeavour, he felt no discouragement at the delay 
in its performance; he had, again like Milton, " an 
inward prompting which grew daily upon him, that 
by labour and Intent study he might perhaps leave 
something so written to after times, as they should 
not willingly let It die." And in this persua- 
sion, and with this faith, he was in no hurry; he 
could afford to be " long choosing " and " begin- 
ning late." 

What Patmore's conception of his subject and 



LIFE IN LONDON 53 

his method of treating it were, have never been 
stated in clearer terms than by Aubrey de Vere in 
some recollections which he wrote down at the re- 
quest of Mr. Basil Champneys : — 

" [Patmore] called upon me one day in a state 
of unusual excitement and animation. Its cause he 
did not care to conceal. There was, he assured me, 
one particular theme for Poetry, the more serious 
importance of which had been singularly missed by 
most poets of all countries, frequently as they had 
taken its name in vain. That theme was Love: 
not a mere caprice of fancy, or Love as, at best, a 
mere imaginative Passion — but Love in the deeper 
and softer sense of the word. The Syren woman 
had been often sung. . . . But that Love in 
which, as he affirmed, all the Loves centre, and 
that Woman who is the rightful sustainer of them 
all, the Inspiration of Youth, and the Consolation 
of Age, that Love and that Woman, he asserted, 
had seldom been sung sincerely and effectually. He 
had himself long since selected that theme as the 
chief one of his poetry, but, often as he had made 
the attempt, it had never succeeded to his judg- 
ment. . . . He had made one attempt more 
and this time a successful one. . . . His poem 
was already nearly finished." 

Aubrey de Vere continues : "In a few weeks 
more The Angel in the House appeared," but this 



54 COVENTRY PATMORE 

is, I think, an error of memory. From other 
documents, I gather that Patmore's visit to him, 
and the ensuing conversation, took place in the 
summer of 1850, whereas the earliest part of the 
poem appeared in 1854. The explanation of this 
delay seems to be that although The Betrothal, and 
perhaps The Espousals, were practically sketched 
out in 1850, their finish did not satisfy a taste 
which was rapidly becoming fastidious. Tennyson 
objected, and not without reason, to the roughness 
of some of the stanzas. Meanwhile Patmore's in- 
spiration flagged again, and it was not until 1853 
that he seems to have contrived to fill up the gaps 
in his structure, and give the whole text its needful 
polish. Tennyson was satisfied at last, and said 
of The Betrothal^ '* You have begun an immortal 
poem, and, if I am no false prophet, it will not be 
long in winning its way into the hearts of the 
people." Patmore appears to have been a little 
over-excited at the immediate prospect of immor- 
tality. He told D. G. Rossetti that he meant to 
make The Angel in the House bigger than the 
Divina Commedia. He hesitated to make the 
plunge into publicity, and sent proof-sheets of the 
first book beforehand to his friends for their final 
censure. It was thus that Tennyson read The Be- 
trothal, " sitting on a cliff close to the sea " in the 
Isle of Wight, in the early summer of 1854, and 



LIFE IN LONDON 55 

told Aubrey de Vere, as an unpublished letter from 
the latter Informs Patmore, that the poem, " when 
finished, will add one more to the small list of 
Great Poems." De Vere adds, on his own account, 
" It Is long since I read anything so beautiful." 

The very moment when his son was preparing 
to give the public a foretaste of his poem was un- 
luckily chosen by Peter George Patmore for pub- 
lishing a volume of not dull Indeed, but unmannerly 
and displeasing reminiscences, entitled My Friends 
and Acquaintances, Nothing could have been 
more ill-timed, for the press rang with denuncia- 
tion of the name of Patmore. The poet deter- 
mined to appear under a pseudonym, and had act- 
ually printed a title-page with the name C. K. 
Dighton upon it, when he was dissuaded by the 
common sense of RossettI from such a piece of mys- 
tification. The same eminently practical friend 
(always so wise when another than himself was 
the object of his interest) Induced Patmore to sup- 
press " a marvellous note at the end, accounting 
for some part of the poem being taken out of his 
former book by some story of a butterman and a 
piece of waste paper." At last. In October 1854, 
was published by J. W. Parker & Son, an anony- 
mous volume of 191 pages, entitled The Angel in 
the House: The Betrothal. It may be said, at 
once, although it takes us somewhat out of our 



56 COVENTRY PATMORE 

biographical sequence, that this was followed In 
1856 by The Espousals^ a volume of not quite so 
many pages. A precious volume consisting of 
copies of the 1854 and 1856 instalments of The 
Angel in the House as altered and re-arranged by 
the author for the second edition of his united 
work, was presented to me by Patmore in 1884. 
This valuable relic lies before me as I write, and 
the alterations, all in the poet's beautiful handwrit- 
ing, are so very numerous that, in many cases, for 
pages together, the MS. entries exceed the print 
in bulk. In later reissues Patmore was incessantly 
revising and remoulding the text, so that to form 
a variorum edition of The Angel in the House 
would be a task before which the boldest bibli- 
ographer might shrink. But the main radical 
changes were made In 1857, and since then the 
poem has been. In essential form, what it is to-day. 
One change which must strike every reader who 
studies the abundant alterations made between 
1854 and 1857, Is a technical, or rather a rhythmi- 
cal, one. Tennyson had not ceased to upbraid Pat- 
more with his want of smoothness; he had said 
that some of his lines seemed " hammered up out 
of old nail-heads.'* When Patmore, as a lad of 
seventeen, began to write verses, he possessed, as 
we have had occasion to note, a most defective ear. 
How far the extraordinary eccentricities which mar 



LIFE IN LONDON 57 

his volume of 1844 were wilful or accidental we 
are hardly In a position to decide, but to read many 
of those early lyrics Is like riding down a frozen 
lane in a sprlngless cart. He had his peculiar 
theories of stress and accentuation, but I think, 
also, that he had much in the Art of Poetry to 
learn. When he came to compose The Betrothal 
in 1850, the lesson was already half prepared, and 
we are safe In attributing the increase in smooth- 
ness and felicity to the close companionship with 
Tennyson which he had been enjoying. But it was 
not until a still later date that he gave his mind 
closely, for the first time, to the study of English 
metrical law, and the proofs of the result lie scat- 
tered broadcast over the pages of his MS. One 
example will show this as well as a hundred. In 
1854 he had printed: — 

For thus I think, if any I see 
Who falls short of my high desire, ' 

but this could not satisfy the fastidiousness of 
1857, and it was changed to: — 

For thus I think, if one I see 
Who disappoints my high desire. 

As every one knows. The Angel in the House 
Is written In a uniform measure of alternate rhym- 
ing eights, the commonest metre for humble 
hymns and ballads that has ever been invented. 



58 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Patmore was often attacked by the critics for 
using this humdrum, jigging measure, and he was 
once challenged to say why he had chosen It. He 
replied that he did so of set purpose, partly because 
at that particular time the Brownings and even 
Tennyson, with the Spasmodists In their wake, 
were diverging Into the most quaint and extrava- 
gant forms, and he wished to call the public back to 
simplicity; but partly also because It was a swift 
and jocund measure, full of laughter and gaiety, 
suitable, not to pathetic themes, but to a song of 
chaste love and fortunate marriage. No doubt 
there Is truth In this, and the simplicity of Pat- 
more's measure pleases us still while the fantastic 
variety of his friend Woolner In My Beautiful 
Lady (1863), a poem which once threatened to 
be a serious rival to Patmore's, has long ago be- 
come a weariness. That Patmore, as he used hotly 
to aver, did not neglect the polishing and fashion- 
ing of his facile metre, a comparison of the dif- 
ferent texts amply proves. 

But the alterations which he made were of a 
far more radical kind than were Involved in mere 
rhythmical correction. He cancelled long passages, 
added new ones, removed stanzas from one part of 
the structure to another, and almost in every case 
these bold and essential changes were improve- 
ments. There can be no question, and the point 



LIFE IN LONDON 59 

is one of great interest in the career of a poet, that 
in 1857 Patmore was in enjoyment of a new flush 
of creative talent. There is therefore a peculiar 
Interest in what he wrote at that time, and I do not 
scruple to print here one or two fragments which 
occur In the MS., but which I cannot discover were 
then or have ever since been printed. What whim 
constrained the poet finally to exclude this exquisite 
little " epigram " with which he had closed the 
seventh canto of his work? — 

" Rejoice evermore ! " 

I err'd this day, O Lord, and am 

Not worthy to be called Thy son ; 
But if Thy will be, heavenly Lamb, 

That I rejoice, Thy will be done ! 
Death I deserve ; I am yet in life ; 

111 is my wage. Thou pay*st me good ; 
These are my children, this my wife, 

I feel the Spring, I taste my food. 
Thy love exceeds, then, all my blame. 

O grant me, since Thou grantest these, 
Grace to put " Hallow'd be Thy name " 

Before " Forgive my trespasses." 

Still less reason does there seem to have been 
for ultimately rejecting " Love of Loves " : — 

" The man seeks first to please his wife," 
Declares, but not complains. Saint Paul ; 

And other loves have little life 

When she's not loved the most of all. 



6o COVENTRY PATMORE 

We cannot weigh or measure love, 
And this excess, assure you well, 

If sinful, is a sin whereof 
Only the best are capable. 

The close of the following brilliant and highly 
characteristic section appears only In the original 
draft of the poem. Mr. Basil Champneys thinks 
that the excision of this passage points to the fact 
that the sense of It was not In accordance with 
Roman doctrine. Mr. Champneys takes occasion 
to give an admirable definition of Patmore's pecu- 
liar view that '* marriage, in its fullest fruition, 
exalts rather than compromises essential purity, so 
long as the partners to it preserved a sense of its 
sacramental character, of Its never-failing fresh- 
ness and mystery." This is unquestionably true, 
but this was Patmore's creed after as well as before 
his conversion, and to the end of his life. The 
conversion, moreover, took place In 1864, while 
this passage was cancelled in 1857. We must look, 
I think, for some other reason, probably a purely 
literary instinct or caprice, for the disappearance 
of these beautiful lines. As the poet composed 
them, they should have come between " Love and 
Honour " and " Valour Misdirected " : — 

The Vestal Fire. 
Virgins are they, before the Lord, 

Whose hearts are pure ; " the vestal fire 
Is not," so runs the Poet's word, 

" By marriage quenched, but flames the higher " ; 



LIFE IN LONDON 6i 

Warm, living is the praise thereof; 

And wedded Hves, which not belie 
The honourable heart of love, 

Are fountains of virginity. 

One more epigram is far too delightful In be 

lost : — 

NoTA Bene. 

Wouldst thou my verse to thee should prove 
How sweet love is ? When all is read. 

Add " In divinity and love 
What's worth the saying can't be said." 

There Is plenty of evidence of the great serious- 
ness with which Patmore composed and revised all 
portions of The Angel in the House, He did not 
regard It as a mere work of entertainment, or even 
as an artistic experiment, but as a task of deep 
social and moral Importance which he was called 
upon to fulfil. This sense of the gravity of his 
mission took, In 1854, a form which he proceeded 
Immediately to reject, no doubt because the expres- 
sion of his feeling, though natural to himself, 
might strike a reader as arrogant. The canto now 
called " The Friends " was originally Intended to 
begin with these lines : — 

May these my songs inaugurate 

The day of a new chivalry, 
Which shall not feel the mortal fate 

Of fashion, chance or phantasy. 



6i COVENTRY PATMORE 

The ditties of the knightly time, 

The deep-conceiving dreams of youth, 

With sweet corroboration chime. 
And I believe that love's the truth. 

The expression here might not be judicious 
from the lips of a very young writer, but it was es- 
sentially justified. The curates and the old maids 
who were presently to buy the poems of Patmore 
as the sweetest, safest sugar-plums of the sheltered 
intellectual life, were themselves responsible for 
the view they took of The Angel in the House. 
They imagined the grim and rather sinister author 
to be a kind of sportive lambkin, with his tail tied 
in bows of blue riband. But Patmore was a man 
of the highest seriousness; he aimed at nothing 
less than an exposition of the divine mystery of 
wedlock, and no reader should consider that he has 
fathomed, or even dipped into, the real subject of 
the poem, until he has mastered the wonderful 
sections at the close, called " The Wedding " and 
" The Amaranth." Here the Ideal of nuptial love 
Is described and expatiated upon, as perhaps by no 
other modern poet, with the purity of a saint and 
the passion of a flaming lover. 

In the original draft, Vaughan, the supposed 
writer of the poem, and his wife, confess that 
they expect it to be cruelly handled by the re- 
viewers, but anticipate the consolation of a warm 



LIFE IN LONDON 6^ 

letter of praise from the Laureate. Of this latter 
satisfaction, they were at least certain; we have 
seen that since 1846 Tennyson had been the near- 
est and the most admired of Patmore's friends, and 
the influence of his comments and encouragements 
Is certainly marked In the texture of The Angel in 
the House. But Patmore had good reason to 
dread the cruelties of the professional critics. His 
earlier volumes had received abuse of a kind such 
as we can now hardly conceive of. Blackwood! s 
Magazine y which had sent Keats " back to his 
gallipots,'* had learned no lesson from the pas- 
sage of years; it had called Patmore's verses slime, 
** the spawn of frogs," and " the ultimate terminus 
of poetical degradation." It is only fair to say 
that, before his death. Professor Wilson apolo- 
gized for the virulence of this disgusting article. 
Other reviews, without being so offensive as this, 
had been very disagreeable. In those days a 
young poet had to fight for his place, and the 
more original he was, the harder was the struggle. 
On the whole, however, the reception of The Angel 
in the House was not unkind. The Athenaum^ it 
is true, published a very cruel article, which began 
as follows: — 

*' The gentle reader we apprize That this new 
Angel In the House Contains a tale not very wise 
About a Person and a Spouse. The author, gentle 



64 COVENTRY PATMORE 

as a lamb, Has managed his rhymes to fit, And 
haply fancies he has writ Another In Memoriam.'^ 

If this is read aloud, it will be seen to be a not 
uningenlous parody of the measure of the origi- 
nal. The whole review was composed in this form, 
and was the work of a then notorious musical 
and literary critic, Henry FotherglU Chorley. 

The breaking out of the Indian Mutiny caused 
the poet to suspend for a year the publication of 
the revised and united Angel in the House, But 
in 1858, after so many sorrows and such a shed- 
ding of the nation's best blood in Russia and in 
India, the public mind in England was eager for 
domesticity and rest. The tender purity of Pat- 
more's poem. Its direct appeal to the primitive emo- 
tions of the heart, precisely suited English feel- 
ing. The Angel in the House began to sell in 
hundreds, then in thousands, and it soon became 
the most popular poem of the day. 

The author proceeded to expand It. In i860 
he published Faithful for Ever^ in which Fred- 
erick Graham, the rejected suitor of the Angel, 
marries a woman not specially suited to him, but 
one who, by dint of worthiness of soul and a 
striving after higher things, becomes a helpmeet 
in the best sense. It cannot be said that this 
theme lends itself well to poetry, and the form 
Patmore now adopted, that of letters in octo- 



LIFE IN LONDON 65 

syllabic rhyme passing between the characters, 
was 111 adapted to his purpose. Faithful 
for Ever was soon melted Into Its successor, The 
Victories of Love, and It Is now by no means easy 
to detach It from the general texture of the whole. 
All this time the health of Emily Patmore had 
been steadily undermined by consumption. On 
July 5, 1862, she passed away, and the Angel In 
the House was burled In Hendon churchyard. 
Whether or not the final section of his poem, The 
Victories of Love, In which the pathetic parting of 
married lovers is dwelt upon with exquisite tender- 
ness, was written before the death of Emily Pat- 
more, appears to be doubtful, but the dates sug- 
gest that it was largely composed In premonition 
of that event. Without dwelling on so private 
and so delicate a subject, there can be no indiscre- 
tion now in saying that certain of the most poig- 
nant odes In Unknown Eros embalm memories and 
episodes of this long-drawn, sad farewell. The 
Victories of Love was composed in a vein more 
resigned If not less ardent, and In the sermon near 
the close of It Patmore distinctly prophesied of 
those psychological mysteries to which, under the 
influence of his second marriage, his Intellect was 
to submit Itself so freely. 

It is worth noting that The Victories of Love 
appeared. In 1862, in successive numbers of Mac- 



GG COVENTRY PATMORE 

miliarias Magazine, where they must have greatly 
surprised the readers of that periodical, utterly 
unaccustomed to so strange a sort of serial. But 
I am told by Dr. Garnett that the offer of £ioo 
for this use In the magazine was gladly accepted 
by Patmore, who was somewhat overborne by 
the expenses of his wife's long illness. In the next 
year The Victories of Love appeared as a small 
volume, and In course of time, having long swal- 
lowed up Faithful for Ever, it has Itself been 
absorbed in the general text of The Angel in the 
House. 



CHAPTER III 

"THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE" 

Among the poets of the Preraphaellte school, 
with whom Patmore was associated when he was 
writing The Angel in the House, freshness of im- 
pression to the eye and ear was aimed at by a great 
solicitude for Ingenuous verse-effects. In the case 
of D. G. Rossetti the metrical simplicity of poems 
like "The Blessed Damozel'' and "Jenny" is 
found contrasted with delicate inventions such as we 
meet with In " Love's Nocturn '* and " First Love 
Remembered.'* Morris had cultivated terza rima 
in " The Defence of Guinevere," curious choral 
forms of a mediaeval kind in " The Chapel in 
Lyoness," and in " Rapunzel," and strange ar- 
rangement of rhymes In his refrained ballads. In 
the poem which is almost the only direct attempt 
to rival The Angel in the House, Woolner's My 
Beautiful Lady, each canto is composed in a dif- 
ferent metre, and some of the stanzalc forms are 
as elaborate and artificial as those used In the seven- 
teenth century by the school of George Herbert. 
In the face of this general tendency to consider 
metrical variety and originality essential, we have 

67 



68 COVENTRY PATMORE 

seen that Patmore composed his great work in a 
measure of the most humdrum simplicity. The 
" modest and unpretentious " metre which he 
chose was that of the rhymed octosyllabic quatrain. 
In advancing years, Patmore became very sen- 
sitive to criticism of the vehicle which he had 
adopted. He resented extremely the charge which 
was occasionally brought against the movement of 
The Angel in the House that it was " garrulous " 
and " prattling." He stated in the strongest terms 
that it was with deliberation, and in order to secure 
certain effects which thereby he did secure, that he 
had chosen what he thought a gay and jocund 
measure, peculiarly well adapted to celebrate the 
joys of marriage. He thought the exaggerations' 
of metrical display, to which our romantic poets 
have constantly been prone, vulgar and ugly, and 
the employment of them likely to disgust the 
reader with a theme of any inherent delicacy. In 
his Essay on English Metrical Lawy which was 
printed in 1856, he adroitly justifies the use which 
he had just been making of the common eight- 
syllable quatrain by describing it as "a measure 
particularly recommended by the early critics, and 
continually chosen by poets in all times, for erotic 
poetry, on account of its joyous air.'* These state- 
ments, as well as the observation that It owes its 
" unusual rapidity of movement " to the fact that 



''THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE" 69 

it is acatalectic, or existing in a state of breath- 
less continuity, may be contested, and were at once 
challenged by Tennyson. But the interesting point 
is the proof this passage gives us of the mode in 
which Patmore regarded the metre which he had 
chosen. 

He was alive to the danger of losing himself in 
a narrative which, however momentous to him- 
self, might seem vapid and trivial to his readers. 
As a matter of fact, the actual story of The Angel 
in the House is of a nature similar to those told in 
exactly contemporary novels, such as Barchester 
Towers and The Daisy Chain. The first thing it 
was essential for Patmore to do was to replace an 
element of realistic entertainment, in the supply of 
which he could not hope to compete with Miss 
Yonge and Anthony Trollope, by delicate ingenu- 
ities of art and by a strain of consistent philosophy. 
The structure of The Angel in the House is ingen- 
ious, and far more elaborate than the casual reader 
suspects. The poem proper is fronted by a Pro- 
logue, and is divided into two books, each book 
containing twelve cantos, each canto being subdi- 
vided into a prelude, a segment of narrative, and 
certain epigrams or epilogues which are independ- 
ent of the story. It must be remembered that we 
possess but a portion of the work, which in the 
early fifties was, as D. G. Rossetti reports, in- 



70 COVENTRY PATMORE 

tended to be bigger than the Divina Commedia, 
Had Patmore carried out this scheme, the recur- 
rence of motifs throughout would have been still 
more marked than it is, and the concinnlty of the 
poem as a work of art still more apparent. The 
" preludes " would then have been seen to form a 
poem in themselves, a philosophical setting, of 
which faith transfigured in love was the theme and 
the inspiration. 

The subject of The Angel in the House was one 
which was generally misunderstood even by those 
who fell most directly under its charm. The poem 
was, primarily and obviously, a breviary for lovers, 
and in this capacity no subtlety was needed to com- 
prehend it. It pleased all women and many men, 
and those who traced in it the echo of their own 
sentiments did not trouble themselves to inquire 
whether the poet had any deeper meaning than 
appeared upon the surface of his work. Youths 
and maidens liked to recognize their own flushed 
and dreamy faces reflected upon a mirror so flat- 
tering and so limpid. Such readers saw that the 
poem was simple, and they rejoiced in its sim- 
plicity without troubling themselves to realize that 
the writer of it was complicated. The effect of the 
poem on a very large number of persons who had 
not up to that time been captured by the spell of 
poetry was very extraordinary. The Angel in the 



^^THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE" 71 

House performed a work of imaginative concilia- 
tion; it brought into the fold of lovers of literature 
a vast number of young men and women who 
had hitherto been utterly recalcitrant to the charm 
of verse. These readers discovered that the in- 
stincts which they had experienced In silence, with 
an abashed acquiescence in the conviction that they 
could never be put into words, were here actually 
interpreted in language of great sweetness and 
melody, and treated as matters of high public im- 
portance. 

The subject of Patmore's poem was singularly 
original. The general tendency of the time was 
to a certain lawlessness in the treatment of sexual 
passion. A wholesome reaction against the timid 
and commonplace concealment of the enormous 
part that sex takes in the whole comity of man was 
expressing Itself more or less rebelliously, with 
more or less juvenile exaggeration. A great poet, 
the contemporary of Patmore, had gone so far as 
to denounce, with scorn and hatred, those who 
wish aux choses de Vamour meler Vhonnetete. 
There would seem to be absolutely nothing in 
common between Baudelaire and the English 
poet who more than any other has celebrated 
Vhonnetete In love; but there is this, their intense 
preoccupation with the problem of sex. The Illus- 
trious Frenchman, to use a familiar image, ap- 



72 COVENTRY PATMORE 

preached the subject as the poacher, Patmore as 
the gamekeeper, and the great originality of the 
latter consists in the boldness with which he has 
accepted marriage, which almost all other poets 
had treated as either the enemy or the conclusion 
of love, as being its very object and summit. What 
is not instantly observed Is that to Patmore, with- 
in the pale of the mysterious sacrament of mar- 
riage, no less psychological ingenuity is possible 
than to Baudelaire outside it. A very curious in- 
stance of this freedom is to be found in the sym- 
pathy which Patmore felt for the boudoir-novelists 
of the eighteenth century. I recollect, in 1881, 
a most interesting conversation with him about 
Les Matines de Cythere of Crebillon pis, In the 
course of which he maintained, paradoxically, that 
such books were not corrupt though they might be 
dangerous, that they contained most valuable an- 
alysis of the human heart, and that their sentimen- 
tal refinements were a tribute to the species of 
occult divinity of which their excesses were power- 
less to deprive their theme. 

The plan of The Angel in the House supposed 
that a modern poet, named Vaughan, while walk- 
ing through the fields with his wife on the eighth 
anniversary of their wedding-day, divulged to her 
the secret that he intended to compose a poem of 
a perfectly new class. 



Coventry Patmore. 

From a photograph by G. Bradshaw, 1886 



" THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE " 73 

The wife, not versed in the history of litera- 
ture, supposes this to be either the life of King 
Arthur or the Fall of Jerusalem, but Vaughan 
corrects her: — 

Neither : your gentle self, my wife, 
And love, that grows from one to all. 

He is a slow writer, however, and It is not 
until a year later that he hands her, on their ninth 
wedding-day, " his leisure's labour ' Book the 
First.' " This external myth, which recurs at 
distant intervals, was doubtless designed to pre- 
vent, what always annoyed Patmore by its inepti- 
tude, the identification of himself and his first wife 
with the hero and heroine of the poem. But before 
we start the story, we have in the preludes to the 
" Cathedral Close," the key-note struck of the 
theme and temper of what is to follow : — 

Thou Primal Love, who grantest wings 

And voices to the woodland birds. 
Grant me the power of saying things 

Too simple and too sweet for words . o , 
The richest realm of all the earth 

Is counted still a heathen land: 
Lo ! I, like Joshua, now go forth 

To give it into Israel's hand. 

Leaving us still somewhat uncertain as to the 
actual latitude and longitude of this mysterious 



74 



COVENTRY PATMORE 



realm, the poet pauses no longer but starts his 
story: In the Close of Sarum, Dean Churchill, a 
widower, brings up in a stately and evangelical 
decorum, three lovely daughters, Honoria, Mil- 
dred and Mary. When Vaughan, still " a rude 
boy," had been intimate with the family, six years 
before, the girls were prigs and prudes. He sees 
them again, and is overwhelmed by the charm of 
their mellowing graces. His age, his temperament, 
his opportunity, alike combine to concentrate all 
his nature on the pursuit of feminine beauty, and 
the poet well paints the egotism of the instinctive 
lover, who could adore all the sisters, or any one 
of the three, being at first blindly and foolishly 
subdued to the general fascination of them all. 
In this condition, delicately polygamous and uni- 
versally enflamed, he pours forth a sort of canticle 
which is one of the most subtly original and at 
the same time one of the most felicitous passages 
in the whole of Patmore's poetry. It must be 
quoted in its entirety: — 

Whene'er I come where ladies are, 

How sad soever I was before, 
Though like a ship frost-bound and far 

Withheld in ice from the ocean's roar, 
Third-winter'd in that dreadful dock. 

With stiffened cordage, sails decay'd, 
And crew that care for calm and shock 

AHke, too dull to be dismay'd, 



"THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE" 75 

Yet, if I come where ladies are, 

How sad soever I was before, 
Then is my sadness banish'd far, 

And I am like that ship no more ; 
Or, like that ship if the ice-field splits, 

Burst by the sudden polar Spring, 
And all thank God for their warming wits. 

And kiss each other and dance and sing. 
And hoist fresh sails, that make the breeze 

Blow them along the liquid sea. 
Out of the North, where life did freeze, 

Into the haven where they would be. 

(The reader will not fall to notice the anapaes- 
tic movements introduced here into the humdrum 
measure, with the symbolic purpose of illustrating 
the pulse and glow of life in its new vague im- 
pulse.) Vaughan is now in that very dangerous 
state in which the heart, having got the habit of 
loving, is ready to be set on fire by every spark of 
beauty. Fortunately, the clouds of roseate radi- 
ance promptly clear away, and he sees Honoria, 
like Venus in the boscages of Ida, obviously and 
unquestionably sweeter than her sisters. There is 
no sign, for a while, that his suit is to be en- 
couraged, and he dies a thousand deaths of fantas- 
tic agony in his impatience. Here Patmore is ex- 
tremely skilful in showing what the effect of love 
is upon the young man's nature. This new-born 
passion, concentrated at last in timid worship upon 



76 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Honoria, tends to the mysterious exaltation of his 
whole being: — 

His merits in her presence grow, 
To match the promise in her eyes. 

And round her happy footsteps blow 
The authentic airs of Paradise. 



Her presence, in short, and the complex emo- 
tions which she awakens In him, reveal to him his 
own power to feel, his very heart, and even the 
material amplitude of the universe. In this exalta- 
tion, the incongruities of social existence fade away 
to nothingness; they are burned up In the fire of 
feeling; and the same transcendent rapture clothes 
the artifice of life at the Close of Sarum as to a 
different class of lover covers the abandonment of 
savage womanhood on the reefs of Tahiti or In the 
woodlands of Ceylon. The accidents of civilized 
life — a respectable house, elegant clothes, the 
amenities of a reformed (and endowed) religion, all 
the comfortable and absurd prose of contemporary 
middle-class felicity — are transfigured by the 
delirium of the sexual Instinct. The cleverness of 
Patmore In dwelling upon all this, which every one 
had vaguely felt, but which no one had ever been 
willing to record, is positively astonishing. He 
paints the flush and rainbow of young love in 
all its exquisite fatuity, yet without slipping into 



"THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE'' 77 

the ridiculous. What, for instance, could be more 
ingenious than Vaughan's philosophical rhapsody 
about Clothes? The young Churchill ladies 
appear freshly dressed for an archery party. We 
see them in our mind's eye, with the bright silks 
drawn over enormous crinolines, revealing the short 
lilac gloves, and the neat balmorals below. Noth- 
ing, it would seem, could be more respectable, and 
nothing more odious to the Muses. Nothing less 
amenable to the sway of Eros, that great god, 
naked and terrible. There are types and Images 
of beauty, justified by the tradition of poetry and 
painting, which demand, surely, that the lover 
should avert his eyes from these ballooning 
crinolines ? 

No! that eclecticism will suffice for literature 
and art, but life Is differently constituted. The 
attraction of pure sexual Instinct cuts through all 
such conventions, and Vaughan learns, as the most 
delicate poet of antiquity learned before him, 
nescit a7nor priscis cedere imaginihus. The 
Churchill ladles start in all their modest finery for 
the garden-party, and this is how their dresses are 
transfigured : — 

Boon Nature to the woman bows ; 

She walks in earth's whole glory clad, 
And, chiefest for herself of shows, 

All others help her, and are glad : 



78 COVENTRY PATMORE 

No splendour 'neath the sky's proud dome 

But serves for her familiar wear ; 
The far-fetch'd diamond finds its home 

Flashing and smouldering in her hair ; 
For her the seas their pearls reveal ; 

Art and strange lands her pomp supply 
With purple, chrome and cochineal, 

Ochre, and lapis lazuli ; 
The worm its golden woof presents ; 

Whatever runs, flies, dives or delves. 
All dolF for her their ornaments 

Which suit her better than themselves ; 
And all, by this their power to give, 

Proving her right to take, proclaim 
Her beauty's clear prerogative 

To profit so by Eden's blame. 

The story, if story it can be called, now pur- 
sues its Innocuous course. Vaughan Is of good 
birth, sufficient wealth and agreeable features; the 
match Is one In which the widowed Dean has no 
excuse for delaying to acquiesce. The course of 
love flows as smoothly as the sleepy river of Avon 
among Its water-lilies. The young man suffers a 
few suitable and necessary delays, during the 
course of which he abandons himself to agonies of 
fear, and then Is Invited, at his own request, to dis- 
cuss some " business," to the Deanery to dinner. 
The ladles rise and leave to their " tasteless wine " 
the elder and the younger gentleman. The Dean 




Coventry Patmore. 

From a drawing by J. Brett, R.A., 1855 

Reproduced from Basil Champneys' " Coventry 

Patmore" by kind permission of Messrs. 

Geo. Bell & Sons 



"THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE" 79 

talks about the British Association, about antiqui- 
ties at Abury: — 

Last, 
He hoped the business was not bad 

I came about : then the wine pass'd. 
A full glass prefaced my reply : 

I loved his daughter, Honor; I told 
My estates and prospects ; might I try 
To win her? At my words so bold 
My sick heart sank. 

Ah! si jeunesse savaiti the Dean, only too de- 
lighted, gives his glad consent at once. It was 
these narrative graces, so curiously in the exact 
taste of the time, which made The Angel in the 
House a direct rival to the guileless domestic 
romances of 1850. 

Patmore was highly sensitive to the criticism 
which was sometimes directed to this portion of his 
work. Such lines as: — 

" Look, is not this a pretty shawl, 

Aunt's parting gift ? " " She's always kind." 

" The new wing spoils Sir John's old Hall j 
You'll see it, if you pull the blind," 

or, still worse, from The Victories of Love — 

" Also, I thank you for the frocks 
And shoes for baby. I (D.V.) 
Shall wean him soon," 

represented a strong desire on the poet's part 
to eschew all rhetoric, and to produce a perfectly 



8o COVENTRY PATMORE 

faithful Impression. In some cases, happier than 
these, he succeeds, but too often he falls to be dis- 
tinguished. It Is extremely difficult to say where 
success ends and failure abruptly begins in these 
cases. The instinct for style Is a delicate thing, 
and it sometimes preserves Robert Browning while 
it abandons Elizabeth Barrett, or takes Tennyson 
smoothly over reefs upon which Patmore strikes. 
The fact remains that the story of The Angel in 
the House, which was that which attracted to it at 
first tens of thousands of readers who cared little 
for poetry, is now to be neglected. What arrests 
our attention is the lyrical psychology of the " pre- 
ludes " and epilogues which form the setting of 
each canto. 

The philosophical interest of the poem becomes 
lively at the point where an ordinary love-tale be- 
comes dull, namely, when the lover is accepted. 
At this juncture the poet draws aside for a moment 
to make a personal confession : — 

How vilely 'twere to misdeserve 

The poet's gift of perfect speech, 
In song to try, with trembling nerve. 

The limits of its utmost reach, 
Only to sound the wretched praise 

Of what to-morrow shall not be ; 
So mocking with immortal bays 

The cross-bones of mortality 1 
I do not thus. 



^'THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE" 8i 

And In his close study of enchanted Instinct, he 
does not forget that this passion of betrothal Is the 
preparation for a great and holy sacrament. What 
thrills the lover with so bewildering a sweetness 
that he seems translated into a new sphere, is the 
ecstasy of feeling that he loves on earth as the 
blessed love In heaven. In describing the strange 
violence of this illusion, which Is purely a matter 
of sexual instinct at base, but which suggestion 
dyes with all the colours of spiritual romance, Pat- 
more attains a rare precision of Insight. Shake- 
speare has scarcely surpassed this close and sym- 
pathetic observation of that mystery of erotic in- 
fatuation which invades and overwhelms the spirit 
of a pure and ardent inamorato — 

How strange a thing a lover seems 

To animals that do not love ! 
Lo ! where he walks and talks in dreams, 

And flouts us with his Lady's glove ; 
How foreign is the garb he wears ; 

And how his great devotion mocks 
Our poor propriety and scares 

The undevout with paradox ! 
His soul, through scorn of worldly care. 

And great extremes of sweet and gall. 
And musing much on all that's fair, 

Grows witty and fantastical . . . 
He blames her, though she has no fault, 

Except the folly to be his ; 
He worships her, the more to exalt 

The profanation of a kiss ; 



82 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Health's his disease ; he's never well 

But when his paleness shames her rose ; 
His faith's a rock-built citadel, 

Its sign a flag that each way blows ; 
His o'er-fed fancy frets and fumes ; 

And Love, in him, is fierce, like Hate 
And ruffles its ambrosial plumes 

Against the bars of time and fate. 

The harlequin passion which invades him occu- 
pies every corner of his heart and distracts all the 
powers of his will. It upsets every rule of logic, 
and makes it a postulate that in love the part is 
greater than the whole. The entire world passes 
into vagueness and dimness, and the crystal atmos- 
phere in which the beloved object seems to walk 
concentrates upon itself all the radiance and all the 
reahty of the universe. In this condition, the lover 
walks in a trance and is so far removed from the 
moods and interests of other human beings that 
it is only by a sort of theatrical effort that he pur- 
sues his mortal course from day to day, as an actor 
not as a real protagonist in life. Cowley, another 
very learned lover, had observed this lunacy of the 
infatuated, and in a lucid moment had cried out : — 

I wonder what the Grave and Wise 

Think of all us that love I 
Whether our pretty Fooleries 

Their Mirth or Anger move ; 
They understand not Breath, that Words do want ; 
Our Sighs to them are insignificant. 



"THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE'' 83 

But Patmore does not consent, even In Irony, to 
call the mysterious movements of the lover '' fool- 
eries." He looks upon them as Inevitable symp- 
toms of the vast change which Is taking place, and 
a great originality Is shown In his analysis of the 
beneficial effect which the passion, so oddly Ini- 
tiated, gradually has upon the nature of both 
lovers. It must not be overlooked that. In The 
Angel in the House, Patmore Is careful to present 
to us two hearts which are fresh, not worn or stale, 
both still wholly virginal In their simple delecta- 
tion. He dwells on the mystic purpose of this sex- 
ual attraction which he paints so clearly, with so 
little taint of false modesty. He shows the general 
benefit to mankind which accrues from the accele- 
rated vigour of the Individual, and he does not pre- 
tend to minimize the egotism of the lovers. He 
admits that their very sacrifices are egotistical. 
But he revels In praise of the new courage which 
comes to them from a consciousness of the in- 
violable fidelity of their mutual desires, and he 
launches his Ideal couple upon 

Love's living sea by coasts uncurb *d, 
Its depth, its mystery and its might. 

Its indignation if disturb'd, 
The glittering peace of its delight. 

The careful reader of The Angel in the House, 
and especially of the brilliant and elaborate section 
entitled " The Espousals," will note with admira- 



84 COVENTRY PATMORE 

tlon the skill with which Patmore develops the 
progress of the passion. What is apt to seem a 
flash of fire to the participants, and a pause of un- 
relieved tedium to the bystander, is perceived by 
the poet to have a logical evolution of its own. He 
dwells with chaste rapture on the joys which are 
the prelude to that mystery of immaculate indul- 
gence which was the aim of his vision. Here he 
was at one with the amorous mystics of the poetic 
literature of all time, with the authors of The Song 
of Songs, and of the Pervigilium Veneris, and of 
the Roman de la Rose. At his highest — as for in- 
stance, in the long section called " The Abdica- 
tion,'' — which cannot be examined here at length, 
but should be carefully studied — Patmore is with 
these poets at their best. 

An unpublished letter from Carlyle, which lies 
before me as I write this page, shows that he at 
least was not blind to the extraordinary elevation 
of this new species of erotic poetry. Writing from 
"Gill, Cummertrees, Arran," in 1856, immedi- 
ately after the publication of The Espousals, Car- 
lyle says: — 

" I brought It with me Into these parts^ the only 
modern book I took the trouble with. Certainly 
it is a beautiful httle piece; high, ingenious, fine. 
The delineation of the thing Is managed with great 
art, thrifty and success ... I have to own the 



''THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE'* 85 

whole thing is an ideal; soars high above reality, 
and leaves mud of fact {mud with whatever step- 
ping stones may be discoverable there) lying far 
under its foot." 

The veteran Walter Savage Landor welcomed 
the same volume in terms which were still more 
appropriate. " Never," he wrote, " was anything 
more tender ... I rejoice to find that Poetry 
has come out again safe, and that Love has dipt 
his wings and cooled his tender feet in our own 
pure streams." And Emerson wrote, " I give you 
joy and thanks as the ' maker of this beautiful 
poem.' " 

The philosophy of The Angel in the House, 
however, cannot be appreciated unless we recognize 
that Patmore loathed and rejected the scholastic 
theory that marriage is nothing but a remedium 
amorisy a compromise with frailty, a best way of 
getting out of a bad business. On the contrary, 
he regarded it as a consecration of the highest 
human virtue, and he held that the more exquisite 
is the goodness which is perceived, or imagined, 
in each loved one by the other, the more perfect 
will be the marriage, and more firmly based on rev- 
erence and hope. It is amusing to record that 
when he became a Catholic, Patmore was for some 
time uncertain whether or no to reconcile The 
Angel in the House with Roman doctrine. At 



86 COVENTRY PATMORE 

first he thought he could not do so, and he with- 
drew the volumes from circulation. Then he was 
persuaded that their teaching received a radiant 
justification in the tenets of the Church, and he re- 
sumed his satisfaction in them. But, as a matter 
of fact, the question was one neither of theology 
nor of logic, but of individual lyricism. The Angel 
in the House is a purely aesthetic observation of a 
certain phase of life, conceived in the intoxicating 
light of imagination. This phase of life is so 
important that all others may be said to depend 
upon it, yet from the majority of mankind it has 
received nothing but ridicule or neglect. It is 
Patmore's great claim upon our respect that he has 
perceived Its dignity and recorded its phases. 



CHAPTER IV 

HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 

(1862-1870) 

The success of The Angel in the House was 
not immediate with the general public. The poem 
was anonymous, and there seems to be a reluctance 
on the part of readers of poetry to accept verse 
which is not made personally attractive by the 
name of its author. The earliest instalment, The 
Betrothal (1854), was fairly well received by the 
press, but The Espousals (1856) was at first met 
by total silence, the most repulsive form of attack 
known to the sensitive race of poets. To be spoken 
ill of Is painful enough, but not to be spoken of 
at all is a thousand times more distressing. " Re- 
solving not to die of dignity," however, Patmore 
wrote to Henry Reeve asking him to neutralize in 
the Edinburgh Review the neglect of the rest of 
the press, but it was not until 1858 that an admir- 
able article by Aubrey de Vere greeted in that 
powerful organ the completed edition of the first 
part of The Angel in the House. By this time 
the poem had been reprinted, and admired, in 
America, and transatlantic praise reverberated ad- 

87 



88 COVENTRY PATMORE 

vantageously in the London book-shops. The 
work which, under the general title, now became 
so popular, was, as must be carefully insisted on, 
the united and almost re-written Betrothal and 
Espousals, 

But this was but a third of the poem as Pat- 
more planned it. These two parts were to have 
been followed by four others, two of which. Faith- 
ful for Ever (i860), and Victories of Love 
(1863) actually appeared, as has been already re- 
ported. Mr. Basil Champneys surmises that, after 
the death of his first wife, " Patmore had not the 
heart to complete the scheme, which apparently 
contemplated giving in greater detail the subse- 
quent life of Felix and Honoria." It is doubtful 
whether he would have recovered a freshness of 
treatment, which to most of his readers seems to 
flag with the opening of Faithful for Ever. It is 
no argument in favour of The Victories of Love 
that its author continued to prefer it to The Be- 
trothal^ since writers almost invariably love best 
their least beautiful productions. The question of 
the development of style In the whole poem has 
already been touched upon. It is enough here to 
say that the public unquestionably accepted the 
two later sections as a pleasant narrative In verse 
tacked on to their genuine favourite, the history of 
Felix and Honoria, but it has always been to the 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 89 

two earlier sections that the great success of the 
work has been attached. 

What that success amounted to, It may be as 
well to state here, although it belongs in its full- 
ness to a much later period of Patmore's history 
than we have yet reached. It began In 1863 when 
the two-volume edition, including The Victories of 
Love, for the first time gave the general public a 
uniform text of their favourite work. Long before 
this, the praises of Tennyson and Carlyle, of Rus- 
kln and Rossetti, of Robert and Elizabeth Brown- 
ing, had given the author all the encouragement 
and joy that a poet in his youth could long for. 
The circle, like that created by a pebble thrown 
into a pool, vibrated more and more widely, with 
less intensity but with greater scope, and in a very 
short time The Angel in the House became the 
most popular poetical work of the generation. It 
was, for a while, the solitary successful rival of 
Tennyson's successive publications, competing with- 
out difficulty with The Idyls of the King, and with 
Enoch Arden. 

Among the best critics this popular success was 
itself a danger, and it was the exorbitant prefer- 
ence of readers for such innocent and idyllic verse 
that led to the attacks which were directed against 
Tennyson and Patmore alike during the revolu- 
tionary period which followed the publication of 



90 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads in 1866. It 
may be said that it was from 1854 to 1864 that the 
fame of Patmore, as the poet of The Angel in the 
House, was most prevalent with the critics. Up 
to this time, he was not a popular poet, but he was 
praised with the greatest enthusiasm by those who 
were accepted as judges. After this, for some fif- 
teen years, he fell into critical desuetude, and was 
the object of very sarcastic and often very unjust 
animadversions; but the public did not follow the 
critics. Just about the time when their reviews 
began to tell them not to admire The Angel in the 
House, readers found that they had formed a pas- 
sion for it, and the popularity of the book steadily 
increased. At the time of Patmore's death, it was 
found that the total sale had exceeded a quarter of 
a million copies. 

This result was due, of course, mainly to the 
eminently attractive nature of the sentiment re- 
vealed in the poem. But several of Patmore's 
friends, by ardent and generous partisanship, vastly 
accelerated the appreciation of educated readers. 
Among such friends, the leading position was 
taken by Ruskin, who overlooked no opportunity, 
whether in public or in private, of enlarging Pat- 
more's circle of admirers. In i860, when the poet 
had been the victim of some particularly unintelli- 
gent piece of reviewers' folly, Ruskin seized the 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 91 

occasion to make a sort of public confesson of faith 
in the genius of his friend. He wrote, in a famous 
letter: — '* I am bound to express my obligation to 
Mr. Patmore, as one of my severest models and 
tutors in the use of English, and my respect for him 
as one of the truest and tenderest thinkers who 
have ever illustrated the most important, because 
commonest, states of human life." All through 
this period, from The Elements of Drawing of 
1857 to Sesame and Lilies in 1865, when Ruskin's 
support was most valuable in consideration of his 
vast and docile circle of disciples, he never hesi- 
tated to give it to the poet whom he admired and 
esteemed so highly. He quoted and praised The 
Angel in the House in his lectures; he recom- 
mended it to the enthusiastic clubs and coteries that 
begged him for advice. Ruskin never shifted his 
allegiance ; the first time he read The Betrothal he 
said that the complete work " ought to become one 
of the most blessedly popular books in the lan- 
guage," and he consistently did what he could to 
hasten on this pleasant consummation. 

On July 5, 1862, in a little house which they 
were renting at Hampstead, Emily Patmore died 
after a long illness. This event formed a crisis 
in the career of her husband, and something of a 
changed view both of life and literature appears in 
his diary and his letters from this moment. He 



92 COVENTRY PATMORE 

had become absorbed In and as It were transmuted 
by her presence. It was with reluctance that he left 
her for a few hours each day, and with violent 
emotions of home-sickness he went straight back 
to her as soon as his duties permitted his return. 
*' Her kind and wise mind; her wifely love, which 
acutely felt every variation of my irregular moods, 
yet never showed any impatience ; her honest heart, 
which instantly discerned the right in every moral 
question; her lofty simplicity," these were traits 
to which he never became accustomed, but which 
held their lustre freshly for him to the last. In 
terms of admirable felicity, he had noted that : — 

An idle poet, here and there, 

Looks round him ; but, for all the rest, 
The world, unfathomably fair, 

Is duller than a witling's jest. 
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each ; 

They lift their heavy lids, and look ; 
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach, 

They read with joy, then shut the book. 
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme, 

And most forget : but, either way. 
That and the Child's unheeded dream 

Is all the light of all their day. 

In this mellow light Patmore had lived for fif- 
teen years, always conscious of its radiance, not 
forgetting, not blaspheming, never falling to give 
thanks. There was but one source of possible divi- 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL g:^ 

slon between him and his wife, and that had not 
become a serious one when she was taken from 
him. More precisely, perhaps, it should be said 
that it had only just become serious. Emily Pat- 
more " had been terrified from her cradle with the 
hideous phantom which Puritanism conjures up 
when the Catholic religion is named.'* Coventry 
Patmore, a mystic in the very essence of his nature, 
was more and more Irresistibly, although uncon- 
sciously, being drawn in the direction of the tran- 
scendent and the supernatural. There was no dis- 
cussion of religious difficulties between the husband 
and wife, simply because. In the advance of her 
malady, Emily could not endure It. Coventry did 
not admit, and was not Indeed aware of any lean- 
ing to Rome, but the acute sensibility of his wife 
detected the trend of feeling. On her death-bed, 
and Indeed only a few days before the close, she 
startled him by saying, with tears, *' When I am 
gone, they (the Catholics) will get you; and then 
I shall see you no more.'' 

Her death, occurring at such a psychological 
moment, disturbed almost as much as It grieved 
him. He was not merely bowed down with sorrow, 
but assailed by poignant doubts. The blow was 
overwhelming in a double direction, and in its 
homely aspect it left him, with his large young 
family and his straitened circumstances, almost 



94 COVENTRY PATMORE 

helpless to perform the duties which had fallen 
from her hands. Notwithstanding this, his spirit- 
ual life seems to have become calmer and more con- 
centrated than it had ever been. He was driven in 
upon himself. The loss of his faultless companion 
was coincident with a strange unkindness and in- 
difference on Tennyson's part, which deprived him 
of the friend whom he had loved and admired the 
most. It is probable that his affection had never 
been returned with anything like an equal ardour, 
but this did not prevent the fact of Tennyson's neg- 
lectful silence from wounding Patmore to the quick. 
In his bitterness, he felt that love and friendship 
were alike lost to him, and he developed a sort 
of austere inaccessibility which was quite new to 
him. Remembering his experience with Tennyson, 
he was unwilling to trust his confidence to others, 
and he drew aside into loneliness with his children's 
animal cares and wants alone to distract him. He 
was rewarded by an accession of mystical rapture, 
of which he has given this account : — 

" For many months after [my wife's] death, 
I found myself apparently elevated Into a higher 
spiritual region, and the recipient of moral powers 
which I had always sought, but never before abid- 
ingly obtained. As far as I could see, God had 
suddenly conferred upon me that quiet personal 
apprehension and love of Him and entire submis- 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 95 

slon to His will, which I had so long prayed for in 
vain; and the argument against my change of re- 
ligion which I had before drawn from my wife's 
state, I now drew from my own: concluding that 
this faith could not be wrong which bore such good 
fruits. But I discovered, as the sense of her spirit- 
ual presence with me gradually faded, that I was 
mistaking the tree which was producing these 
fruits. It was not that of supernatural grace in 
me, but the natural love of the beauty of super- 
natural grace as I recalled it in her; and, at the 
end of a year, I found myself greatly advanced in- 
deed towards that inviolable fidelity to God which 
He requires, but still unmistakably short of its 
attainment." 

During this time, while he shrank from the 
company of his earlier associates, there were some 
of them who would not let him go. Prominent 
among these was Woolner, whose poem of My 
Beautiful Lady was at this time published, not 
without Patmore's careful final revision, and 
Aubrey de Vere, of whose lyrics Henry Taylor and 
Patmore in concert now printed a selection. But 
the most remarkable new acquaintance formed at 
this period was that of William Barnes, the poet 
of the Dorsetshire dialect. All his life, Patmore 
was singularly attracted to the language, atmos- 
phere and modes of thought of that district of 



96 COVENTRY PATMORE 

England which Mr. Hardy has taught us to call 
Wessex. Patmore thought it the most classical, 
the richest and most abundant province of our 
country. Barnes, although at this time a man of 
over sixty years of age, had not yet inherited his 
full renown. His third collection of Poems of 
Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect had appeared in 
1862, and had come into Patmore's hands. He 
liked them, and he turned to the earlier collections 
of 1844 and 1859, and enjoyed these still more; 
he wrote articles in several prominent periodicals 
claiming for the work of Barnes a prestige which 
it had never before been granted. 

When he began to correspond with the Dorset- 
shire poet, he found many links of a private kind. 
Barnes had been bereaved, as Patmore had been, 
of a devotedly worshipped wife, who had left a 
similar number of little children behind her. The 
two poets wrote to one another consolingly " of 
the result of a like loss from a matured experi- 
ence.'' In the early months of 1863 Patmore de- 
clared to Barnes that no other living man's history 
attracted him so much as the Dorset poet's did; " I 
stedfastly intend to see you this year," he added. 
Neither Patmore nor Barnes was rich enough to 
travel recklessly. But in the summer of 1863 the 
former, irresistibly drawn, contrived to make his 
way to Dorchester. He had formed a very exalted 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 97 

notion of his host; he discovered a plain little old 
man, adorably simple, dressed picturesquely in the 
garments of a past age, gifted with an instinctive 
power of idyllic song, but of limited experience in 
life and thought. Patmore was full of poetry, and 
inspired by transcendent speculations; he found 
Barnes surrounded by glossaries and grammars. 
As Patmore whimsically described it, years after- 
wards, to a friend who had been visiting at Came 
Winterbourne the then very venerable Mr. Barnes 
— he wanted to discuss the mystery of the Incarna- 
tion and he found Barnes buried " in a horrible 
kind of philological thing he called Tiw/' Pat- 
more retained through life his high respect for the 
character and genius of Barnes, but I do not think 
that he made any further attempt to cultivate his 
personal acquaintance. 

This was an example of the Idealizing habit 
which grew upon Patmore at this time, and which 
coloured the rest of his communications with his 
fellow-beings. He was irresistibly induced to set 
before them an exceedingly high standard of con- 
duct, of achievement, of capacity. Nobody came 
up, in common life, to Patmore's conception before- 
hand of what they were capable of being and do- 
ing. It was not censoriousness which made him 
exacting, it was rather the heated atmosphere in 
which he saw life. What seemed a harshness often 



98 COVENTRY PATMORE 

sprang out of a fondness, for It was his very belief 
In the high capacity of those whom he admired 
which led so inevitably to disappointment. He 
thought In hyperbole, and nothing was moderate 
or mediocre with him. If he approved of a person, 
that person walked along the mountain-tops, with 
the light of God upon his face. He disapproved, 
and the man became not merely a failure, a poor 
creature, but a positive cretin^ a blot upon the face 
of nature. This violence of judgment, and this dis- 
proportionate Idealism, had always, no doubt, been 
present In his nature, but they were kept In hand by 
his first wife's sober and firm Influence. After her 
death, In the earliest painful months of Isolation, 
they asserted themselves and became patently char- 
acteristic. 

Patmore's relations to his own children partook 
of this extravagance of feeling. From 1862 to 
1864 they formed his principal solicitude, and no 
man, left lonely In this piteous condition, was ever 
more anxious to do his duty to those for whose 
lives he was responsible. Many of his letters from 
this period have been printed by his careful and 
tactful biographer; It Is Impossible to deny that 
they give a somewhat painful Impression. One 
little girl has expressed the hope that her sister 
will not be disappointed by something; her father 
writes: "You may be quite sure that I am as 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 99 

tender about Bertha's feelings as you are." The 
four younger children were placed, early in 1863, 
in the care of some ladies at Finchley, and Pat- 
more saw them almost every day. He loved them, 
and they seem to have been both intelligent and 
well-behaved. But he suffered cruelly from the 
utterly impossible standard of conduct which he 
placed before them. He made no allowance for 
the instability of childhood or even for the frailty 
of mankind. His spirit was ceaselessly sore with- 
in him because some little naughty person had been 
disobedient, or boisterous, or forgetful. ^' The 
immense superiority of girls over boys " struck him 
more and more forcibly, but even girls were sadly 
to seek. Quite little girls, alas ! find it difficult to 
say their prayers and read quite " as willingly and 
long and deliberately " as Patmore expected his 
daughters to do. 

The constant strain of responsibility for these 
young motherless creatures was very trying to his 
nerves. He gave the subject a consideration too 
constant, and he lost, in his lonely excitement, a 
sense of proportion. All the little wayward errors 
which a mother deals with so patiently, corrects so 
gently and says nothing about, took monstrous pro- 
portions to this austere idealist, with his impossible 
expectations. He was driven to an exaggeration 
which must make us smile. He wrote: " I have 



l.ofC. 



loo COVENTRY PATMORE 

indeed very little respect for children. Their so- 
called Innocence is want of practice rather than 
Inclination, and all bad passions seem to me to be 
more violent in children than in men and women, 
and more wicked because In more immediate con- 
junction with the divine vision." This view has 
at least the Interest of being diametrically opposed 
to the lazy optimism which treats children as waxen 
toys whose very faults are funny. Sin did not 
amuse Patmore, and what Is worthy of a smile is 
not the suggestiveness of the moral paradox, but its 
pathetic exaggeration. Before a widower with a 
flock of youthful souls to take care of can write 
thus, he must have undergone a good deal of In- 
ternal exasperation for which his boisterous babes 
are only in part to blame. 

It was at this time, and after one of these pain- 
ful moods, that he wrote the ode called " The 
Toys," which illustrates, with more delicacy and 
truth of analysis than any biographer can hope 
to seize, the ceaseless oscillation of his spirit 
between severity and tenderness. It Is a " docu- 
ment " of the highest possible value to us in form- 
ing a just notion of the temperament of Pat- 
more : — 

My little Son, who looked from thoughtful eyes 
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise, 
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd, 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL loi 

I struck him, and dismiss'd 

With hard words and unkiss'd, 

His Mother, who was patient, being dead. 

Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep, 

I visited his bed. 

But found him slumbering deep. 

With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet 

From his late sobbing wet. 

And I, with moan, 

Kissing away his tears, left others of my own ; 

For, on a table drawn beside his head. 

He had put, within his reach, 

A box of counters, and a red-vein'd stone, 

A piece of glass abraded by the beach, 

And six or seven shells, 

A bottle with bluebells. 

And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art^ 

To comfort his sad heart. 

So when that night I pray'd 

To God, I wept, and said : 

Ah ! when at last we lie with tranced breath. 
Not vexing Thee in death. 
And Thou rememberest of what toys 
We made our joys. 
How weakly understood 
Thy great commanded good. 
Then, fatherly not less 

Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, 
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say, 
" I will be sorry for their childishness." 

But everything was drawing him in one inevi- 
table direction, although as yet he knew it not. 



I02 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Nothing served to assuage his melancholy, which 
time seemed to deepen rather than to remove. 
The great religious question oppressed his thoughts 
more and more. He was already a man of settled 
practical piety, and nothing In his conduct or his 
habits of thought Interfered with the perfect can- 
dour of his soul In relation to heavenly things. In 
later years he never accused himself of anything 
more serious than Ignorance of the will of God 
In this slow and painful transformation of his 
faith. Something began to draw him irresistibly 
to the city of Rome, and In February, 1864, he ob- 
tained the needful leave of absence for the purpose 
of making a lengthy stay there. He started with 
no anticipations of pleasure on the way — " I ex- 
pect to be very dull and miserable," — but as though 
drawn by some superhuman force along an Inevi- 
table path. Aubrey de Vere, however, was in 
Rome, " and nobody can be dull or miserable 
where Mr. de Vere is." Patmore's first Impression 
of Rome was deeply unfavourable; the Idealist had 
been at work, as usual, and had formed a dream- 
picture of a celestial city, all majesty and refine- 
ment, which the squalid quarters of modern Rome 
most cruelly belied. 

Patmore was admitted, however. Into " the best 
Catholic society of the great centre of Catholic 
life," and at last, as if quite suddenly, he perceived 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 103 

why he had come to Rome. It was that he might 
get the great question of religion settled once and 
for all. He accepted the situation, and placed 
himself under the regular instruction of a Jesuit, 
Father Cardella. He tells us that all his Intellect- 
ual objections were confuted, and his will was more 
and more powerfully attracted, but that, together 
with the attraction, grew the alternating reluctance 
and repulsion. This went on for many weeks. In 
the friendly company of the gentle and distin- 
guished persons, Italian and English, to whom 
Aubrey de Vere had presented him. " Their 
ways," he says, " convinced me that I should not 
be leaping Into any strange gulf of uncongenial 
life if I became a Catholic, but no one helped 
me nearly so much to remove this fear as a lady 
whom I now met in this society." 

This lady, destined to be Coventry Patmore's 
second Egeria, was Marianne Caroline Byles, who 
had at one time been looked upon as likely to be 
the second wife of Manning, and who had In com- 
paratively mature years exchanged the Anglican 
for the Roman communion. She was older than 
the poet, being at this time nearly forty-two 
years of age. The influence which she exer- 
cised over Patmore is best described in his own 
words : — 

" I had never before beheld so beautiful a per- 



I04 COVENTRY PATMORE 

sonallty, and this beauty seemed to be the pure 
effulgence of Catholic sanctity. After a short ac- 
quaintance, which progressed rapidly to intimate 
friendship, I asked her to be my wife. Her reply 
was that she was under a formal religious promise 
never to marry, having placed, by the hands of 
a priest, her written undertaking to that effect upon 
the altar and under the chalice containing the 
Blessed Sacrament. I thought this answer final, 
not having any idea how easily such undertakings 
are dispensed with in the Catholic Church, pro- 
vided they are not monastic. I continued, but 
in much depression of spirits, my hitherto line of 
meditation, with the same alternation of periods 
of repulsion and attraction, and the same ap- 
parent hopelessness of reconciling reason and con- 
science, till one night, as I was sitting alone at my 
hotel, it struck me that nothing would ever bring 
about this reconciliation except the act of submis- 
sion, and that this act certainly would do so. For 
the first time, I felt that I was able and that I ought 
to take this leap . . . and fearing that the 
clearness In which my path now lay might be ob- 
scured, I set off to the house of the Jesuits and 
Insisted on being admitted, though it was long 
after the hour at which the rule had closed its 
doors. Father Cardella refused to receive me as 
a Catholic there and then, but I made my gen- 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 105 

eral confession to him, and was received a day or 
two afterwards." 

Patmore lived thirty-two years after this event, 
but no shadow of religious doubt ever crossed his 
understanding or his conscience again, and we have 
to regard him from this time forward as having 
come completely into harmony with the dogmas 
and the traditions of the Catholic Church. In this 
he displays an Interesting likeness to a poet of the 
seventeenth century whose genius had some rela- 
tion with his own, Richard Crashaw. An im- 
mediate result of the decisive step Patmore had 
taken was to remove the veil of nervous depression 
which had hung over him. He became radiant 
with spiritual complacency and joy, and everything 
around him was bathed in rose-colour. It Is evi- 
dent that his relation to Miss Byles Immediately 
took a fresh aspect. She was the first person, out- 
side the circle of the Jesuits, to whom he communi- 
cated the fact that he had found peace. Her 
scruples against marriage were no longer serious, 
or — as seems possible — she had dwelt upon them 
with feminine cunning In order to force him into 
the way of her faith. At all events we find the 
couple promptly betrothed (May 1864). But an 
honourable difficulty now arose. Patmore had be- 
lieved Miss Byles to be the paid companion of an 
elder lady with whom she was travelling, and who 



io6 COVENTRY PATMORE 

was evidently wealthy. To his extreme confusion 
he discovered that the money belonged to Miss 
Byles herself, who possessed a considerable fortune. 
Exceedingly annoyed and abashed at this circum- 
stance, he suddenly left Rome and abandoned his 
suit; but he was persuaded to " condone the em- 
barrassing condition " and to return. They went 
back separately to England, and In July were mar- 
ried at Bayswater. 

Of Marianne Patmore, as she now became, 
singularly little has been preserved or recorded. 
She was a woman of taste and even of a little learn- 
ing, pious, gentle and somewhat timid. Her hus- 
band's loud protestations and emphasis of state- 
ment kept her In a perpetual tremor, but she was 
entirely devoted to love and admiration of him. 
The faithful biographer of Coventry Patmore, 
Mr. Basil Champneys, has been obliged, after baf- 
fling search, to record of Marianne, the poet's sec- 
ond wife, that " the extraordinary self-effacement 
and reticence which was characteristic of her In life 
seems fated to attend her memory." She was her 
husband's devoted companion for nearly sixteen, as 
her predecessor had been for nearly fifteen years. 

It Is certain that during the debateable period 
between his first wife's death and his second mar- 
riage, Patmore's Ideas with regard to poetry under- 
went a very remarkable change. In later life he 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 107 

was accustomed to Insist on the essential oneness of 
his work, and to point to its uniform features. But 
setting his eloquent casuistry aside, the reader can- 
not fall to see a very broad chasm lying between 
what he wrote up to 1862 and what he wrote after 
that date. In the first place the appeal to a popu- 
lar judgment, to a wide circle of amiable readers, 
entirely disappears. Patmore, with the removal of 
so many earthly ties, and with the growth of what 
was mystical and transcendental in his tempera- 
ment, became haughty in his attitude to the world. 
His conscientiousness as an artist was quickened, 
and at the same time he gave way to a species of 
intellectual arrogance which had always been dor- 
mant In his nature, but which now took the upper 
hand. He was no longer anxious to please by any 
concessions to the public taste, and the earliest 
sign of his altered temper was that discontinuance, 
of which mention has already been made, of The 
Angel in the House. In his new mood, he had 
nothing more to tell the curates and the ladies 
about Frederick and Felix. 

His mind turned to another ambition. He 
formed the design of a long poem, the precise 
scope of which he never divulged, but which was 
to deal with the moral questions evoked by what 
the poet considered the grave decadence of the 
age. He was to sing, with fervour and despair, a 



io8 COVENTRY PATMORE 

loud song which few would care to hear, but which 
had to be sung " because the dark comes on apace, 
when none can work for fear." From the first he 
had no illusions about the popularity of what he 
would now write: — 

One said, Take up thy Song, 

That breathes the mild and almost mythic time 

Of England's prime ! 

But I, Ah, me, 

The freedom of the few 

That, in our free land, were indeed the free. 

Can song renew? 

Ill singing 'tis with blotting prison-bars. 

How high soe'er, betwixt us and the stars ; 

111 singing 'tis when there are none to hear. 

It IS of fragments of the poem Inspired by this 
theme and in this mood that the Odes of 1868 
were composed. We may see in these nine remark- 
able lyrics a certain note of unity In method, but 
of unity of subject there is very little. Patmore In- 
tended no doubt to make the poem a general con- 
fession, a record of his soul's adventures In face of 
life and the world. But it Is doubtful whether even 
Milton or Leopardi, the two poets with whom at 
this juncture it Is natural to compare him, could 
have succeeded In producing an Integral work on 
these particular lines; and the partiality of a biog- 
rapher must not blind us to the fact that we are 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 109 

dealing with a writer of less constructive force 
than Leopardi, not to speak of Milton. 

As the vehicle of his Odes, and indeed of most 
of the subsequent poetry of his life, Patmore chose 
a curious form, which was justified, I think, more 
by the admirable success of many of his experi- 
ments in it than by its inherent beauty. This was 
a broken and irregular arrangement in what he 
described as " catalectic " metre, but which re- 
minded the profane of what Patmore particularly 
despised and rejected, the loose measures called 
Pindaric after Cowley's misconception of the metri- 
cal system of Pindar. Patmore scorned the amor- 
phous odes of the Restoration period, and claimed 
that his own had no relation with them. Yet when 
Patmore is languid and Cowley is unusually felici- 
tous, it is difficult to see much difference in the form 
of their odes. Whether Patmore ever acknowl- 
edged it or no, or indeed whether the fact has ever 
been observed, I know not, but the true analogy of 
his Odes is with the Italian lyric of the early 
Renaissance. It is in the writings of Petrarch and 
Dante, and especially in the Canzoniere of the 
former, that we must look for examples of the 
source of Patmore's later poetic form. 

At the close of 1865, as it was no longer neces- 
sary for him to work for his living, and as a ten- 
dency to lung complaint warned him of the danger 



no COVENTRY PATMORE 

of remaining in London, Patmore resigned his 
position as an assistant in the Library of the 
British Museum, and withdrew to the country. 
He bought two contiguous estates, covering about 
four hundred acres, on the borders of Ashdown 
Forest in Sussex. . There was an ancient, but un- 
comfortable and neglected house, and this, with the 
whole of both estates, had to be taken in hand and 
improved. Nothing in the past experience of Pat- 
more had prepared him for such labours; but his 
remarkable business ability only required an oppor- 
tunity to develop itself. " The problem before 
him was to make his house healthy, habitable and 
architecturally pleasing; to convert the land ad- 
joining it from its aspect of a somewhat neglected 
farm into the suitable setting of a gentleman's 
residence; to master all the details of agricultural 
management, game-preserving, and the duties of 
a landlord; and to do all this with extreme econ- 
omy, so that each step taken might enhance the 
value of the estate by more than the expenditure." 
How he solved the problem Is told In the little 
volume entitled How I Managed and Improved 
my Estate (1888), a book which goes far to out- 
balance the charges so often brought against poets 
as persons of no business capacity. After 1868 It 
was the garden, the fish-ponds and the woods which 
engaged his attention. 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL iii 

The exquisite serenity of this active and yet 
healthy and cheerful life is reflected on much of 
the verse that he wrote at this time. His invitation 
to Felicity was perfectly responded to: — 

So with me walk, 
And view the dreaming field and bossy autumn wood, 
And how in humble russet goes 
The Spouse of Honour, fair Repose, 
Far from a world whence love is fled 
And truth is dying because joy is dead . . . 
Let us to stiller place retire, 
And glad admire 

How, near Him, sounds of working cease 
In little fervour and much peace ; 

And let us talk 
Of holy things in happy mood. 
Learnt of thy blest twin-sister. Certitude. 

He became calm, and he became gleeful. The 
old depression of spirits, the old irregularity of 
mood, passed away, and he was both mentally and 
physically Invigorated. The name of the estate 
where the house stood was Buxted Old Lands, a 
title which the poet considered neither pretty 
nor significant; In 1868 he altered It to Heron's 
Ghyll, in reference to the beautiful, but maraud- 
ing birds which gathered to his fish-ponds as to a 
banquet. 

In April, 1868, Patmore printed for private 
circulation nine of the fragments which he had 



112 COVENTRY PATMORE 

probably ^ been writing at intervals since his first 
wife's death. They took the form of an anony- 
mous paper pamphlet, with pale green covers, bear- 
ing only the words Odes [not published^ ; a short 
preface was signed " C. P., Old Lands, Uckfield, 
April 17, 1868.'' In 1881, before any biblio- 
graphical curiosity in Patmore's writings had been 
excited, I asked him how he could account for the 
extreme rarity of these Odes. He told me that 
only 250 copies were printed, and that he sent 
copies in all directions, to his friends, and to 
strangers who might, he fancied, be Interested In 
them. But he found that they were universally re- 
ceived with indifference or mystification, and so one 
day, in the autumn of 1868, as he was seated in 
front of the great open fireplace in the hall of 
Heron's Ghyll, he determined to make away with 
what were left of them. His daughters, it appears, 
had fortunately withdrawn a few, but 103 copies 
remained, and these the poet destroyed then and 
there. The anonymous Odes of 1868 is therefore 
one of the rarest as it is one of the most Interesting 
poetical volumes of the Victorian age. 

It is diflicult to account for the frigid reception, 
by Patmore's particular admirers, of poems so 

^ Mr. Basil Champneys' conjecture that all these nine odes 
were suddenly composed in the first three months of 1868, doeS 
not seem to me in accordance with probability or with internal 
evidence ; but no record of their exact dates has been preserved. 



HAMPSTEAD AND HERON'S GHYLL 113 

original and In part so beautiful as these nine odes. 
Ruskin, It Is true, though without enthusiasm, 
" recognized the nobleness " In them, and there Is 
some reason to believe that Carlyle, with whom 
Patmore was just now again In Intimate relations, 
approved. But Aubrey de Vere, whose graceful 
traditions they mortified, strongly disapproved of 
them, and others, like Tennyson, perceived noth- 
ing. It was at this moment that all England had 
its ears open to the brilliant melodies of Mr. Swin- 
burne; no other music could be heard. Yet it 
seems amazing that among all the Initiates and 
experts to whom the little pamphlet was sent there 
should not have been one who perceived, as a por- 
tent, the beauty of : — 

Love, light for me 

Thy ruddiest blazing torch, 

That I, albeit a beggar by the Porch 

Of the glad Palace of Virginity, 

May gaze within, and sing the pomp I see ; 

For, crown'd with roses all, 

'Tis thou, O Love, they keep thy festival ! 

or were amused by the audacity which described 
the year 1867, with Its Reform BUI and its Disraeli 
as Chancellor of the Exchequer, as : — 

Year of the great Crime, 
When the false English nobles and their Jew, 
By God demented, slew 
The trust they stood thrice pledged to keep from wrong. 



114 COVENTRY PATMORE 

The fortunate thing Is, however, that Patmore, 
however angry and disillusioned he might be, was 
thoroughly determined to proceed, and that the 
discouraging result of his experiment In 1868 did 
not In any degree prevent him from pushing on to 
further heights of boldness and vigour. The ulti- 
mate Unknown Eros could scarcely have been more 
admirable than It is If Its beginnings had been 
greeted, as those of The Angel in the House had 
been, by the plaudits of Browning, Tennyson and 
Rossettl. 



CHAPTER V 

LAST YEARS (1870-1896) 

Patmore improved and enlarged Heron's 
Ghyll, until it became a sort of white elephant, and 
was too expensive for him to keep up. Moreover, 
agricultural depression began to make itself sen- 
sibly felt, and he feared to find himself stranded 
with a very costly toy which he could neither use 
nor part with. He was fortunate in letting and 
then selling the property in 1874 to the Duke of 
Norfolk, who gave him £27,000 for it, £8,500 
more than the original cost and the improvements 
together had come to. This deserves peculiar 
celebration as an instance, possibly unique, of a 
poet's having made a substantially advantageous 
bargain in a business transaction. Between the 
letting and the final transference of Heron's Ghyll 
to the Duke, the Patmores took a furnished house 
in London, and at this time he made several of the 
acquaintances of his later life, besides reviving 
some old friendships. But London never suited his 
health, and he looked out at once for another and 
less responsible country residence. 

"5 



ii6 COVENTRY PATMORE 

When Patmore had been only five or six years 
of age he had been taken to Hastings In a coach, 
and had noticed, as they drove along the old Lon- 
don road, a large house facing the High Street, the 
whole front of which was covered by an enormous 
magnolia. The child registered a vow that when 
he grew up and was a man he would come and live 
in that beautiful house, with Its casing of great 
white blossoms. It was somewhat extraordinary 
that In 1875, when he was looking about for a 
home, this Identical dwelling, called the Mllward 
Mansion, was offered to him. He accepted It with 
alacrity, and on terms which, as he believed, se- 
cured him the use of It for hfe. This residence had 
Immense advantages for him. It was easy of access 
from London, whereas a visit to Heron's Ghyll had 
been like an adventure Into virgin forest. It was ex- 
ceedingly amusing. In Its proximity to the pictu- 
resque life of the old borough. If Patmore wished 
to be amused ; while It was so far protected and se- 
questered, that by stepping Into the high terraced 
garden he could at any moment retire Into absolute 
seclusion. For seventeen years the Mllward Man- 
sion (or Manor House) was Patmore's home, and 
he lived here in great serenity and Independence, 
enlivened by frequent visits from his friends, and 
leading exactly the life which It pleased him to lead. 
The Hastings period was not without Its sorrows ; 



LAST YEARS 117 

Its bereavements indeed were frequent and severe ; 
but on the whole it was probably the happiest seg- 
ment of the poet's life. 

Among those with whom he had renewed per- 
sonal intercourse in 1874 was Mrs. Procter. The 
aged poet, her husband, who had been known as 
Barry Cornwall, was at that time under a cloud of 
senile decay. Patmore's sympathies were warmly 
drawn out by the spectacle of his old friends* 
troubles, and he showed most delicate attention to 
Mrs. Procter. When her husband died at length, 
in the autumn of 1874, Patmore's kindly help was 
redoubled. In her cordial gratitude, Mrs. Procter 
thought to do Patmore honour by giving him the 
task of writing the life and editing the remains of 
Barry Cornwall. As he told me, soon after, he was 
" aghast '* at the proposition, and did all he could 
to dissuade the lady, but she was firm in insisting. 
*' I could not refuse,'' Patmore said, " though it 
was a task little suited to me. I was never really 
intimate with Procter, though I had known him 
many years; and though I admired his simple, 
sincere and reticent character, I cared little for his 
poetry." A biography started under these condi- 
tions was not likely to be satisfactory. After long 
delays there appeared at last, in 1877, Bryan 
Waller Procter, consisting of a memoir, an auto- 
biographical fragment and some letters, the whole 



ii8 COVENTRY PATMORE 

put together In the most languid and perfunctory 
manner possible. The dangers of obliging Coven- 
try Patmore to do something which he did not want 
to do were startllngly exemplified In this unfortu- 
nate volume, which Is destitute of all biographical 
merit. Mrs. Procter, however, a woman of sin- 
gular tact, professed herself well pleased with it. 
This biography, to which merely the Initials C.P. 
were grudgingly affixed, was Patmore's earliest 
prose-work published In the form of a book. 

He was now, however, preparing for the pub- 
lication of a poetical work of the very highest im- 
portance. In 1873, ^s we have seen, a scruple of 
conscience had combined with an alteration of taste 
to make him for the moment profoundly dissatis- 
fied with The Angel in the House. He withdrew 
this popular work from circulation, and made a 
bonfire of the remainder of the current edition. 
This strange prejudice, which soon passed away, 
was coincident with a violent Impulse to produce 
poetry of that more mystical and transcendental 
order, of which the Odes of 1868 had given a small 
circle of readers the foretaste. To a friend, who 
gently reproached him with Idleness, he replied : — 
" No amount of idleness Is wrong In a poet. Idle- 
ness is the growing time of his harvest,'' and he in- 
dicated that the field of his imagination was grow- 
ing ripe for the sickle : — 



LAST YEARS 119 

** I have no plans as yet, for none of my old ones 
seem wide enough; but I am preparing myself, by 
six or seven hours reading and thought every day, 
for any plans that may be presented to me. If I 
am to do any more work, it must be on some new 
level. The longer it is before the key-note of my 
new song is given to me, the sweeter perhaps it 
will be." 

In the transition, it seems that Ruskin was of 
great service. It will be recalled that in 1868 he 
had not perfectly responded to the appeal of the 
Odes^ but he now wrote that " no living human 
being had ever done anything that helped him so 
much " as Patmore had by writing these poems. 
Yet the poet continued to wait, as he always did, 
for " a flash of spiritual health " to reawaken his 
genius. He read mystical Catholic poetry, and in 
particular the De Partu Virginis of Sanazzaro, but 
that did not inspire him. The settling in of his 
household, under the great magnolia at Hastings, 
seems at last to have started the beat of the pulse 
of poetry, although the vigorous ode called " The 
Standards" is earlier still and belongs to 1874. 
Another political satire, '^ Peace," perhaps opens 
the series of odes written at Hastings, but to 1876 
certainly belong " A Farewell," " Let Be," " The 
Two Deserts," and " If I were Dead," amongst 
others. An undated note, which may perhaps be 



I20 COVENTRY PATMORE 

attributed to 1877, says, " I have written as much 
in the last three weeks as the whole of the nine 
OdesJ^ His best things were always composed 
most quickly. The '* Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore,'* 
one of the longest and most elaborate of the new 
odes, took two hours to write, and several of the 
best numbers in The Unknown Eros even less, 
although Patmore would often occupy days and 
weeks in polishing up one short passage to the 
level of the best. 

The outburst of this passion of poetry, and the 
rapid ripening of this second and richer harvest of 
Patmore's genius was coincident with an emotional 
crisis in his religious life. He was now in his fifty- 
fifth year, and had reached an age at which it is 
usual for the more vivid impulses of brain and 
body to decline. At fifty-four a man has usually 
tasted all the dishes which make up the banquet of 
life, and has no great desire to begin the feast over 
again. He has formed his opinions and appeased 
his curiosity, and he is fortunate if he has not 
allowed his experience to fortify him in that " sotte 
et caduque fierte," which Montaigne describes as 
the intellectual vice of approaching old age, that 
obstinate satisfaction in what is already known and 
seen which dulls the heart and fossilizes the brain. 
On the contrary, at this advanced stage of middle 
life, a great wave of passion broke over Patmore's 



LAST YEARS 121 

spirit, and bore him along with it. His imagina- 
tion, his mystical and his religious vitalities were 
simultaneously quickened, and he walked along the 
sea by Hastings, or over its gorse-clad downs, mut- 
tering as a young man mutters, with joy uplifting 
his pulses and song breaking from his lips. 

This condition had been preceded by a depressed 
and melancholy one. He had thought himself fail- 
ing both in intellectual and spiritual power. His 
digestion had long been weak, and in consequence 
he had availed himself of the dispensations from 
fasting which the Catholic Church so readily grants 
for a reasonable cause. Patmore had set his dul- 
ness down to overindulgence, and when the fast of 
1877 came round, he resolved to keep it fully. 
He was unable, however, to digest eggs or fish, and 
so had to keep the fast on vegetables. This re- 
duced him to the verge of a serious illness, but an 
alteration of diet staved off the malady. He was 
not aware of a further change, but it probably came 
about Easter, 1877. Doubtless the physical con- 
ditions helped to bring it on, and it is difficult to 
believe that the severe fasting, although weaken- 
ing for the moment, had not been salutary. The 
religious development which now followed he had 
described in terms of great moderation and sim- 
plicity in a fragment of autobiography. He had 
now for thirteen years been a member of the 



122 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Roman Church, and during all that time no shadow 
of a doubt had crossed his understanding. But 
there were certain points on which his feelings had 
always been hopelessly out of harmony with the 
feelings and practice of most Catholics. This was 
particularly the case with regard to the Blessed 
Virgin. His experience Is so Interesting, that it is 
best here to give his own words : — 

" I was In the habit, Indeed, of addressing Her 
In prayer, and believed that I had often found such 
prayers to be successful beyond others ; but I could 
not abide the Rosary, and was chilled and revolted 
at what seemed to me the excess of many forms of 
devotion to Her. Good I hoped might come of 
some practical contradiction of this repugnance, 
some confession In act and will of what my feelings 
thus refused to accept. I therefore resolved to do 
the very last thing In the world which my natural 
Inclination would have suggested. I resolved to 
make an external profession of my acceptance of 
the Church's mind by a pilgrimage to Lourdes. 
This I undertook without any sensible devotion, 
and merely In the temper of a business man who 
does not leave any stone unturned when a great 
Issue Is at stake, though the prospect of attaining 
thereby what he seeks may seem exceedingly small. 
Accordingly, on the 14th of October 1877, I knelt 
at the shrine by the River Gave, and rose without 



LAST YEARS 123 

any emotion or enthusiasm or unusual sense of 
devotion, but with a tranquil sense that the prayers 
of thirty-five years had been granted." 

The importance of this passage, to the student 
of Coventry Patmore's character, is not to be exag- 
gerated. It offers us the key of his life, his attitude, 
his entire contribution to literature ; it offers us the 
key, but it leaves to us the task of turning it In the 
lock. He does not mention here, what was a de- 
liberate part of his plan, that he hoped to get fresh 
inspiration for his Odes from the atmosphere of 
Lourdes. In this he was not disappointed. He 
had not anticipated any natural charm in the 
Pyrenean place of pilgrimage, but he found that 
" for beauty and sublimity It defies all description." 
Not ready to expatiate In full-mouthed catalogues 
of the charms of scenery, he has nowhere in all 
his correspondence Indulged In so many enumera- 
tions of them as In connection with his visits to 
Lourdes : — 

" The effect of this climate on the health and 
spirits is quite Intoxicating," he says for instance In 
October 1877. "The air Is cool and sharp, but 
the sun Is like a hot fire close by. One may put up 
one's hands to warm them by it. The world looks 
like a jewel for brightness. Snow-fields, thirty 
miles off, look half a mile away. Little lizards run 
about the rocks in the hot light, and beautiful half- 



124 COVENTRY PATMORE 

butterflies, half-grasshoppers, leap and fly when- 
ever one moves." 

He came home full of enthusiasm and happi- 
ness, in perfect health, and longing to relieve in the 
composition of poetry that vibration of ecstasy 
which made dreams of his days and kept him awake 
for joy at night. The series of odes, thirty-one 
in number, which formed the collection entitled 
The Unknown Eros, were rapidly revised and com- 
pleted, and this important volume made its appear- 
ance in 1877. But it did not contain the great ode 
called " The Child's Purchase," which seems to 
have taken shape on the poet's return journey from 
Lourdes. It had flashed upon him during his 
pilgrimage that the one absolutely lovely and per- 
fect subject for poetry, as he conceived it, would 
be the Marriage of the Blessed Virgin. He had 
for some time been laying, as he hoped, a durable 
foundation for the exercise of his mystical fancy 
by reading daily in St. Thomas Aquinas. The copy 
in which he studied the Summa was one of consum- 
mate beauty; it was of the first edition of the Opera 
Omnia (1570-71), in seventeen volumes, printed 
on vellum and bound in purple morocco.^ Patmore 

^ For an interesting account of this bibliographical treasure, 
which Patmore ultimately gave to the British Museum, see 
Mr. Basil Champneys' Life and Lettersy vol. ii., appendix 6, 
PP- 443-445- 



LAST YEARS 125 

considered St. Thomas " a huge reservoir of the 
sincere milk of the Word," and the result of study- 
ing him seriously was that In his own brain the 
poetry began to grow " like the moonrlse when the 
disk Is still below the horizon." 

The ode which has just been mentioned, " The 
Child's Purchase," should be examined if we wish 
to obtain an Insight Into Patmore's intentions at 
this critical moment. It contains a direct dedica- 
tion of his powers to that service and celebration of 
the Blessed Virgin which, up to this time, he had 
neglected. He describes himself as a child, whose 
mother In jest flings him down a golden coin. This 
is, of course, his poetical genius. He is to spend, 
that Is to say to exercise, it as he best pleases, and 
he will buy " a horse, a bride-cake, or a crown." 
But he wearies in the quest, and determines at last 
to bring his gold coin back to his Mother and to 
give it back to her in exchange for a kiss. Accord- 
ingly, " verging upon, but never entering, the 
breathless region of Divinity," Patmore will dedi- 
cate his golden gift of poetic speech, no longer to 
any earthly use, however innocent or salutary, but 
to the direct glory of the divine Mother : — 

Ah ! Lady elect, 

Whom the Time's scorn has saved from its respect, 

Would I had art 

For uttering this which sings within my heart I 



126 COVENTRY PATMORE 

But, lo ! 

Thee to admire is all the art I know. 

My mother and God's ; Fountain of miracle I 

Give me thereby some praise of thee to tell . . . 

Grant me the steady heat 

Of thought wise, splendid, sweet, 

Urged by the great rejoicing wind that rings, 

With draught of unseen wings. 

Making each phrase, for love and for delight, 

Twinkle like Sirius on a frosty night. 

The same poem, Imperfect perhaps from its very 
excess of emotion, but possessing admirable por- 
tions, closes with lines which have a great value In 
the biography of our poet. Looking back at his 
past verse, he cries : — 

Mother, who lead'st me still by unknown ways. 

Giving the gifts I know not how to ask. 

Bless thou the work 

Which, done, redeems my many wasted days. 

Makes white the mark. 

And crowns the few that thou wilt not dispraise. 

When clear my songs of ladies' graces rang. 

And little guessed I 'twas of thee I sang ! 

Vainly, till now, my prayers would thee compel 

To fire my verse with thy shy fame, too long 

Shunning world-blazon of well-ponder'd song ; 

But doubtful smiles, at last, 'mid thy denials lurk ; 

From which I spell, 

" Humility and greatness grace the task 

Which he who does it deems impossible 1 " 



LAST YEARS 127 

This prodigious effort — and no lyrical poet has 
moved in a more ambitious cause — was doomed to 
disappointment. Of the majestic song in praise of 
the Blessed Virgin nothing remains but the initial 
ode and a few fragments, — merely a porch, where 
a cathedral was intended to rise. Perhaps the 
strain was excessive ; perhaps Patmore did not wait 
with sufficient serenity of spirit for the heavenly 
spark to fall. All we know Is that the great poem 
for which he made his pilgrimage to Lourdes re- 
mains in the limbo of unconstructed masterpieces. 

Meanwhile, he was more fortunate with humbler 
and less transcendental themes. In 1878 he pub- 
lished Amelia, which Is at once the most human and 
the most inspired of all his writings, that In which 
his poetic philosophy Is most plainly revealed. 
Some seventeen odes, also subsequent to the Un- 
known Eros of 1877, completed this section of his 
work. Of these several give expression to a politi- 
cal hopelessness which was obviously excessive at 
the time, and which the passage of years has shown 
to be wide of the mark. Without deciding whether 
the trend of politics, with its long upward and 
downward curves, has in the course of a quarter of 
a century been for practical good or evil, without 
expressing either joy or sorrow at the chronicle of 
our institutions, it has at least to be confessed that 
Patmore had no intuition of that trend. He was 



128 COVENTRY PATMORE 

the wildest of political prophets. In an ode like 
" Arbor Vitae," the splendour of the imagery, the 
rush of inflamed and angry thought, must be ac- 
cepted for their own sake; beneath the symbolism 
there lies no justice of public apprehension. The 
attacks of Patmore on the Government of his day 
are not contributions to philosophical poetry, con- 
sistent and intelligible even in their savagery, like 
the admirable lambes of Auguste Barbier. They 
resemble much more those political odes of Leo- 
pardi, such as the "Italia" and the "Angelo Mai," 
In which the cup of scorn and anger overflows 
without an aim, merely covering the whole scheme 
of things with a spatter of contumely. 

Far more delightful are the non-political odes of 
Patmore which represent this his latest period as 
a poet. A section of them — " Saint Valentine's 
Day," "Sponsa Del," "Psyche's Discontent," 
" To the Body " — deals with profound and subtle 
questions of sex, mystically encountered. Other 
odes are purely human, enchanting memories of 
past suffering nobly borne, jewels fashioned In the 
furnace of bereavement, "The Azalea," "Depart- 
ure," "Auras of Delight." For the future all are 
Inextricably mingled In the division of his poetry 
which Patmore chose to call The Unknown Eros, 
and there they will doubtless remain, like Roslcru- 
cian symbols, wholly unintelligible to the multitude. 



LAST YEARS 129 

but discovered with a panic of delight by a few elect 
souls in every generation. 

The publication of The Unknown Eros and of 
Amelia^ together with the resuscitation of The 
Angel in the House, should have made the year 
1877-8 a period of partial revival in Patmore's 
career. But his reputation had sunk into almost 
complete desuetude, and it could not at once be re- 
vived. The tendency to revival, however, now set 
in In private; he made the acquaintance of several 
younger writers, and he found among them a sym- 
pathy which he had ceased to enjoy in his relations 
with the companions of his own youth. The mem- 
ory of those who first came into communication 
with him at that time will dwell on the earliest 
manifestations of a certain modification In his char- 
acter. They knew them as he was in the act of 
change ; they saw him already coloured with transi- 
tion. After 1880 he rather suddenly became an 
elderly man, having preserved his youth for an 
unusually long time. He lived sixteen years more, 
but these were years of withdrawal and meditation. 
In this closing period, Patmore preserved the un- 
altering appearance of one who sits waiting for an 
inevitable arrival. He chats, he writes a little, 
he accedes to the claims of society, but he is lis- 
tening all the time for the sound of the chariot- 
wheels. 



I30 COVENTRY PATMORE 

It may be convenient here for me to take up this 
little history from a more intimate standpoint. 

My personal acquaintance with Coventry Pat- 
more had opened by his courteously sending me, in 
the summer of 1878, the four-volume edition of his 
complete works, then just published. In 1 879 I met 
him for the first time at the Savile Club, of which 
he was for a short while a member. It was in 
company with several other and younger men, and 
he made a highly disagreeable impression on me; 
I thought him harsh and sardonic; he said little, 
and what he said was bitter. But, in the course of 
1880, after his removal to Hastings, we began to 
correspond on the structure and function of the 
Ode, a subject which he had illustrated both in 
theory and practice, and on which his views were 
curious and, I ventured to think, on some points 
technically heterodox. At length, soon after New 
Year's Day, 1881, I was invited to Hastings to 
spend a Sunday with him; I went down, in some 
trepidation, remembering that countenance as of a 
sourer Macchiavelli which I had seen at the club, 
and my reception was a surprise and an enchant- 
ment. This was the first of unnumbered pil- 
grimages, to which I shall always look back as 
among the most tonic experiences of my social life. 

He had taken, as we have seen, the Milward 
Mansion, a large, ancient house, then lately vacated 



LAST YEARS 131 

by the death of Countess Waldegrave, In the centre 
of the old town of Hastings. With Its belt of ven- 
erable elms and Its high garden-terraces, the man- 
sion looked, as Patmore used to say, " like a patch 
of forest In the midst of the houses." It was ap- 
proached from the High Street, but, the moment a 
visitor entered Its enclosures, he seemed lifted at 
once out of the town, and suspended between chff 
and sky and sea. When he entered, the room Im- 
mediately on his left was the poet's study and the 
receptacle of his few books; beyond It, on the same 
side, a long, low drawing-room opened directly 
upon the garden, which surprised the eye here by 
Its high level, the house being perched In a dip of 
a sharp Incline. It Is difficult to Imagine a home 
better suited to a poet's vagaries, so sequestered 
was It within, so suddenly accessible from all parts 
of the surrounding town. At this time, and long 
afterwards, Patmore Indulged a passion for noc- 
turnal walks. Somnolent and sluggish In the after- 
noon, his pulse would begin to beat as the night 
came on, and would rise Into an excitement which 
nothing but a long, wild stroll In the darkness could 
allay. On occasion of my first visit to him, In Jan- 
uary, 1 88 1, I recollect that I was summoned to 
accompany him. We sallied forth Into the gloom 
of the faintly twinkling town, and descended swiftly 
to the sea-wall. The night was fine, with buffeting 



132 COVENTRY PATMORE 

wind, the remnant of a great storm; the tide was 
high, and it was difficult to pass along the Parade 
without being drenched by the fountains of spray 
which rose, mysterious and phantasmal, out of the 
resounding darkness. My companion was in an 
ecstasy; he marched forward with his head in the 
air, his loose, grey curls tossing in the breeze, his 
coat blown wildly away from his thin figure. He 
seemed, to my fancy, to be the enchanter whose 
magic had raised all this turmoil of the elements, 
and to be empowered, at will, to quiet it all in a 
moment. But this was evidently no part of his 
pleasure. He revelled, mischievously, in the riot, 
and he prophesied the ruin of the sea-front of 
Hastings in words the solemn effect of which was 
a little impaired by the violent gusto with which 
they were spoken. It was long before he could be 
persuaded that the tide was on the turn, and that 
Hastings could not perish on that particular night. 
And then his excitement fell; moodily and silently 
he climbed the deserted street. 

Those who made Patmore's acquaintance with- 
in the last few years of his life recall his company 
as enlivened by short spurts of speech set in vast 
tracts of silence. But it was not so in 1881. The 
speech, at least, was more frequent, the silence less 
noticeably long. My first Sunday at Hastings was 
spent mainly at his study fire. I see him now, 



LAST YEARS 



33 



stretched in his familiar seated attitude, his hands 
clasped, his arms extended along his legs, the whole 
body attenuated and immobile, only the marvellous 
head moving sharply and frequently, almost as if 
on a pivot, the eyes darkling and twinkling, the 
Protean lips reflecting in their curves every shade 
of feeling that passed over the poet's mind. Out of 
this attitude, he would move only to pounce, with 
extraordinary suddenness, on one of the cigarettes 
which lay strewn about, like leaves in Vallom- 
brosa, lighting it and then resuming his shrouded 
and pinioned pose. And so sitting, sloped to 
the fire, he would talk for hours of the highest 
things, of thoughts and passions above a mortal 
guise, descending every now and then to earth 
in some fierce, eccentric jest, always to be punctu- 
ated by a loud, crackling laugh, ending in a dry 
cough. 

In these first hours, he initiated me at once, al- 
most without prelude, into the ardent and sublime 
mysticism which filled his imagination. That I 
quite comprehended would be to say too much, but 
I sympathized and admired. He could not dis- 
course on these themes too fully for my curiosity, 
and conditions happened to have attuned my mind 
at that moment to a particularly keen receptivity. 
It would be affectation were I to pretend that the 
advent of a pupil so enthusiastic did not give the 



134 COVENTRY PATMORE 

solitary prophet pleasure ; he expressed that pleas- 
ure with his customary vehemence; and as I look 
back I recognize with grateful satisfaction that 
I was able to comfort this austere and beautiful 
spirit by my sympathy at the moment of its deepest 
isolation. In 1881 the very name of Patmore was 
still ridiculous. The Unknown Eros was abso- 
lutely ignored; The Angel in the Hoiise^ after its 
great, rustic success, was wholly rejected by those 
who were the tyrants of criticism. A very few per- 
sons of authority, among whom the late Henry 
Sidgwick and Mr. Frederick Greenwood were pre- 
eminent, still believed In Patmore as a poet, but 
their verdict was disregarded. He never ceased to 
believe in himself; indeed, at this very time, when 
not a voice came to greet him from the outer 
world, his virile pride was probably serener than 
it had ever been. But self-supporting as the soul 
may be, it pines for the human echo, and what 
little intelligent sympathy I could give was received 
as if It had been the gift of a king. 

We ascended high Indeed, the wren mounting 
with giddy rapture on the wing of the eagle. I 
have rarely touched such pure intellectual enjoy- 
ment. To listen to Patmore in those days, days 
of his spiritual ecstasy, before the bitterness had 
fallen upon him, was to assist at a solemn, mount- 
ing music. From having lived so much alone, from 



LAST YEARS 135 

having escaped all the friction of the mind which 
comes from indiscriminate intercourse, his speech 
and thought had preserved, with a certain savage 
oddity, a singular freshness, a wild flavour of the 
berry. In talking to him, one escaped from all 
the worn conventions of conversation; instead of 
rubbed and greasy coppers, one received fresh- 
minted gold. Patmore's intellect had now for a 
long while been fixed on a particular purpose, which 
may perhaps be defined as the reconciliation of 
modern life with the spirit of the liturgical manuals 
of his communion and the more mystical writings 
of the Fathers. He was particularly devoted to a 
later ascetic writer, St. John of the Cross, a Span- 
iard of the sixteenth century. In whom Patmore 
found an extraordinary agreement with the views 
which he himself had formed in meditation. He 
was fond of reading to me passages of St. John of 
the Cross, which often sounded exactly like rear- 
rangements of The Unknown Eros, I was sur- 
prised to find In 1 88 1 that Patmore was not ac- 
quainted with the poems of our own most fiery 
mystic, Crashaw, and I had the pleasure of send- 
ing them to him. But he knew the originals at 
which the torch of Crashaw had been lighted and 
was tiresomely conscious of the conceits and blem- 
ishes of an hysterical fancy. Yet " Music's Duel," 
the great paraphrase from Famlanus Strada, he 



136 COVENTRY PATMORE 

pronounced " perhaps the most wonderful piece of 
word-craft ever done." 

It was now years since he had written a page 
of prose, with the perfunctory exception of the 
Bryan Waller Procter^ which he had published in 
1877 ; in earlier youth, the practice of prose writing 
had afforded him profit and satisfaction. It ap- 
peared to me that It would now add alike to his use- 
fulness and to his enjoyment if he resumed composi- 
tion. Verse he had reluctantly abandoned for some 
time (I think that his very latest printed poem 
dates from 1880), on the ground that he had sung 
what he could not help singing, and that nothing 
should be torn from a reluctant muse. But I could 
see no reason why his exquisitely lucid prose should 
not be given to the world. To my first sugges- 
tions of this kind, he replied that " the little work- 
ing power I have left in me is bespoken^'''' meaning 
that he had not lost the hope that he might yet be 
inspired to continue the great poem on Divine Love 
which he had dreamed of at Lourdes. Under 
my continued pressure, however. In February, 
1 88 1, he showed me a MS. translation from St. 
Bernard on The Love of God^ which his second 
wife, who died In 1880, had begun and he had 
completed. This he said I might find a publisher 
for, If I could, and I took it up to London with 
me. Mr. Kegan Paul consented to print it, and 



LAST YEARS 137 

a few months later It appeared. This is a very 
delightful treatise, far too little known. It Is 
always exciting to a retired author to smell printer's 
ink once more, and Patmore forthwith started the 
composition of that " Sponsa Del,'' of which I 
shall presently have a doleful tale to tell. 

The latest of his poems, to which reference has 
just been made. Is the " Scire Telpsum," which 
opens thus: — 

Musing I met, in no strange land, 

What meet thou must to understand : 

An angel. There was none but he. 

Yet 'twas a glorious company 

God, Youth and Goddess, one, twain, trine, 

In altering wedlock, flamed, benign, 

which has always appeared to me an absolutely 
typical specimen of the peculiar Patmorian quintes- 
sence. In sending me the MS. of these verses 
(July 25, 1882) he wrote: "They may be taken 
as expressing the rewards of virginity — 
attainable even In this life — In the supernatural 
order," and he went on to lament that his years for- 
bade him to be any longer " a worker In the in- 
exhaustible poetic mine of psychology." In point 
of fact, he was to publish verse no more. 

His great Interest in these years. In the early 
eighties, was the beautiful church of Our Lady 
Star of the Sea, which Mr. Basil Champneys was 



138 COVENTRY PATMORE 

building for him, almost opposite the Mansion, 
but a little lower down the street. This became 
Patmore's ceaseless pre-occupatlon, and a daily de- 
light it was, when the workmen had left in the 
evening, to prowl and potter round the foundations 
In the dusk or watch the bright silver of the Chan- 
nel from their precincts. As the fabric rose, Pat- 
more's ecstasy increased; when the scaffoldings 
could be safely mounted, he could scarcely be In- 
duced to let them out of his sight. This intense 
satisfaction In the noble gift which he was pre- 
senting to his communion lasted until the church 
was consecrated, but was soon after embittered and 
destroyed by disputes which, at length, made him 
glad to leave Hastings. I think It right to record 
my opinion that in this wretched matter he was 
greatly in fault, through Indulgence in that in- 
flexible arrogance which was a defect in his great 
character, but the arguments on the other side, 
which Mr. Champneys has brought forward, 
should be carefully weighed. In connection with 
his own church, Patmore developed a sudden en- 
thusiastic interest in ecclesiastical sculpture; this 
was awakened by seeing, in the summer of 1882, 
Mr. Thornycroft's superb statue of " Artemis " 
which belongs to the Duke of Westminster. The 
virginal freshness of this figure appealed with ex- 
traordinary fervour to Patmore's imagination, and 



LAST YEARS 139 

he desired that an attempt should be made to 
induce one of our first sculptors to model a 
Madonna, " of which," he said, " the marble 
original should be taken by some wealthy church 
like Arundel, and casts be supplied to other 
churches — including ours — at moderate prices." 
The notion of having a really first-rate statue, casts 
from which should supersede " the wretched 
Munich things Catholics now have to put up with," 
eagerly commended itself to him. He saw Wool- 
ner on the subject, and Mr. Thornycroft himself, 
but the idea, so eminently practical and felicitous, 
unhappily came to nothing. I believe that Car- 
dinal Newman once made, equally in vain, an 
Identical suggestion. 

In February, 1883, Patmore lost his youngest 
son, Henry, a promising young man of less than 
three-and-twenty, In whom several of the char- 
acteristics of the father were repeated, and In 
particular a distinct gift of verse. Henry Patmore 
was steeped In the psychological mysteries of his 
father's conversation; his appearance was marred 
by his sickliness. He was tenaciously silent In com- 
pany, and not what is called " attractive," yet evi- 
dently a studious, pious, and talented lad, whose 
future would probably have been brilliant. His 
little volume of Poems, arranged by his father, 
with a touching memoir by his sister, Gertrude, 



I40 COVENTRY PATMORE 

now Mrs. Watts, was published at Oxford In 
April, 1884. These circumstances, and the death 
of an elder daughter, who was a nun In a convent. 
Increased, about this time, the gravity and grlm- 
ness of the poet, but without radically disturbing 
his serene Inner life. That Henry's talents had 
not had an occasion to ripen was a disappointment 
to him; but he wrote, " I feel prouder and gladder 
of his innocent and dutiful life than if he had been 
the greatest poet of the age." 

In 1884 the tide of detraction which had so 
long swept over Patmore's fame as a poet ebbed 
away. In several of the leading reviews there ap- 
peared articles In which the excellence of his work 
was more or less intelligently dwelt upon, and In 
which the Importance of The Unknown Eros was 
emphasized. Through the period of his strange 
obscuration, Patmore had shown a dignified pa- 
tience; but the neglect had not lasted long enough 
to sour him. The praise of the critics, the tributes 
which now began to flow in upon him from 
younger writers, gave him pure pleasure. In this 
year I saw more of him than ever, for he had 
determined that I was to be his literary executor, 
and he had to explain at great length his wishes 
regarding MSS. and books. From this agreeable 
but responsible duty he afterwards released me, 
on the very sensible ground that it was more con- 



LAST YEARS 141 

veniently fitted to a member of his own commun- 
ion. The arrangements I speak of — which came 
to nothing — were hurried on in consequence of a 
rather serious illness, which reduced his spirits very 
greatly, and from the effects of which he perhaps 
never wholly recovered. In June, 1883, on a very 
hot day, he was unguarded enough to sleep for a 
couple of hours, stretched in the shadow of Bodiam 
Castle, a picturesque but highly malarious ruin on 
a small lake in the north of Sussex. As Patmore 
put it, the courtyard of this structure was " a 
cauldron of unwholesome marsh-air," which laid 
him up with a sharp attack of ague, and made him 
regard his future with a jaundiced eye. 

The increase in public appreciation of his work 
was now steady. In the summer of 1886 an illus- 
trated edition of The Angel in the House was pro- 
jected, and Mr. Frank Dicksee and Mr. Alfred 
Parsons were asked to undertake it. As, however, 
these artists were found to be too deeply engaged, 
and as Patmore, with characteristic decision, said 
that it must be " those bodies or no bodies," the 
scheme fell through. But in collected and selected 
editions, cheap and dear, his poems now once more 
sold in great abundance; and with new prose his 
pen was kept relatively busy. In 1881, Miss Har- 
riet Robson, long a valued friend of the family, 
became his third wife, and presently the birth of a 



142 COVENTRY PATMORE 

son In his old age gave the sequestered poet Infinite 
occasions for fresh hopes and Interests. And thus, 
to quote his own words, he remained " for sev- 
eral years, singularly happy, If to have friends, a 
fair competence, a rising family of extraordinary 
promise, and no history, Is to be happy." And 
then an event occurred, to which, although It was 
purely of the Intellectual order, I am Inclined to 
attribute a critical importance In his career. 

Since 1 88 1 Patmore had been engaged on a 
prose work, called Sponsa Dei, which was In strict 
accordance with, and Illustrated the same moods 
as The Unknown Eros. I had received minute in- 
structions as to the publication of this book, which 
he had directed me. In case I survived him, to issue 
at a certain time after his decease. He must have 
completed the MS., I suppose, in 1883. An In- 
cident of a very startling nature disturbed this 
plan. On January 30, 1888, when I had been 
staying a day or two with Patmore at Hastings, 
he said to me at breakfast, abruptly, almost hys- 
terically, " You won't have much to do as my lit- 
erary executor! " and then proceeded to announce 
that he had burned the entire MS. of Sponsa Dei 
on the previous Christmas Day. His family knew 
nothing of this holocaust, and the ladles Imme- 
diately cried, " O papa, that Is why you have 
been so dreadfully depressed since Christmas!" 



LAST YEARS 143 

I said little at the moment, but when I was alone 
with him In the study, I asked him If he seriously- 
meant what he had stated. He replied yes, that It 
was all destroyed, every scrap of It, every note, 
except one page, which he had published In 1887 
in the " St. James's Gazette." He had come to 
the conclusion that, although wholly orthodox, 
and proceeding no further than the Bible and the 
Breviary permitted, the world was not ready for so 
mystical an interpretation of the significance of 
physical love in religion, and that some parts of 
the book were too daring to be safely placed in 
all hands. 

It appeared that it was at the advice of a re- 
markable man of Imperfect genius. Father Gerard 
Hopkins, that the act had been performed. When 
it was too late, Hopkins wished that he had been 
more guarded in making his reflexions. But he 
had placed before Patmore the dilemma of having 
either to burn the book or to show It to his direc- 
tor, and the latter alternative was offensive to the 
poet's pride. 

The Sponsa Dei, this vanished masterpiece, was 
not very long, but polished and modulated to the 
highest degree of perfection. No existing speci- 
men of Patmore's prose seems to me so delicate, or 
penetrated by quite so high a charm of style, as 
this lost book was. I think that, on successive occa- 



144 COVENTRY PATMORE 

slons, I had read it all, much of it more than once, 
and I suppose that half a dozen other intimate 
friends may have seen it. The subject of it was 
certainly audacious. It was not more nor less than 
an interpretation of the love between the soul and 
God by an analogy of the love between a woman 
and a man ; it was, indeed, a transcendental treatise 
on Divine desire seen through the veil of human 
desire. The purity and crystalline passion of the 
writer carried him safely over the most astounding 
difficulties, but perhaps, on the whole, he was right 
in considering that it should not be thrown to the 
vulgar. Yet the scruple which destroyed it was 
simply deplorable; the burning of Sponsa Dei in- 
volved a distinct loss to literature. 

From this time, although the change may not 
have been obvious to those who saw him daily, 
Coventry Patmore was an altered man. He began 
to grow old; he gradually lost the buoyant, joyous 
temperament which had been to him " the bliss of 
solitude." His judgment, which had always been 
violent, became warped, the expression of his pref- 
erences took an exaggerated form. He was none 
the less a delightful and stimulating companion, 
but he gave no longer the impression of inward 
serenity. This modification of his temperament 
proceeded slowly, but I do not think that the 
existence of it could be denied. In the summer 




Coventry Patmore. 

From the portrait by J. S. Sargent, R.A., 1894, now in the National Portrait Gallery 
Reproduced from "The Work of John S. Sargent, R.A.," by kind permission of 
Mr. William Heinemann 



LAST YEARS 145 

of 1889 he reprinted from the " Fortnightly Re- 
view " and the " St. James's Gazette " about 
thirty picked essays under the title of Principle in 
Art; this was a charming little book, extraordi- 
narily finished in form and suggestive in ideas; 
most of it was written before the destruction of 
Sponsa Dei. In bringing it out, Patmore was 
amusingly defiant of criticism; he put his back to 
the wall and expected no mercy. He wrote, in a 
letter (June 17, 1889), the reviewers "will say, 
or at least feel, * Ugh, ugh ! the horrid thing ! It's 
alive ! ' and think it their duty to set their heels 
on it accordingly." I think he was positively dis- 
appointed at the warmth and respect with which it 
was received by the press. When, a year later, one 
was recommended to look out for an article in the 
approaching " Fortnightly Review," where " by 
way of a spree, I have run a-muck against every- 
thing and everybody," one trembled, and not per- 
haps without cause. Patmore's latest serious utter- 
ances are to be discovered in two later volumes, 
Religio Poetae, 1893, ^^^ The Rod, the Root, and 
the Flower^ 1895, where, in company with much 
that is wholly characteristic and perennially val- 
uable, there is mingled not a little which savours, 
I think, of the aimless violence and preposterous 
paradox of failing power in a very original mind. 
And if anything could possibly console us for the 



146 COVENTRY PATMORE 

loss of so majestic a spirit and so dear a friend, it 
would be the conviction that his work was done. 

He meant to lead the rest of his life at Hastings, 
in the house which he loved so much. He had a 
lease of it renewable every seven years, but at the 
end of the fourteenth year, in 1889, he asked the 
agent to change the tenure to an annual one. He 
did this, as he explained to me at the time, " in 
provision for the possibility of my dying and leav- 
ing my wife burthened with a long lease of a house 
much too large for her.'' The agent consented, 
but in 1 89 1 the proprietor — a ward in lunacy — 
died, and the new owner immediately gave Pat- 
more notice to quit, although it was represented to 
him in the strongest terms that there had been an 
understanding that the poet was not to be dis- 
turbed. Patmore loudly lamented " the immense 
trouble and loss to me in various ways, I having 
built a big Church opposite my door, invested the 
greater part of my money in local property," etc. 
etc. The law, however, was inexorable, and he 
had to go. 

At Michaelmas, 1891, he quitted Hastings and 
was lucky enough to find a house that exactly 
suited him at Lymington. It was a bluish build- 
ing, standing coyly askew among trees, very retired 
and dowdy-looking, on a muddy point of land op- 
posite the Isle of Wight. There were passages, 



LAST YEARS 147 

winding staircases, raised landings, secret panels, 
thirty-five rooms all a little shrouded and sombre, 
but with enchanting views over the bright, tidal 
expanses. At the back of it stretched three acres 
of garden, rather dolefully overweighted with 
trees, green glades that led to pathless wastes, yew 
hedges, steep grass borders, empty hollows, and 
no flowers at all. Patmore's fancy was Inflamed 
with the oddities of this queer place, which he de- 
clared, authoritatively, to be the most desirable 
estate in the county of Hampshire. That there 
was but one post a day, no delivery of newspapers, 
no Sunday trains, a toll of a halfpenny and a voy- 
age in a ferry-boat on every excursion into the 
town, and a hundred little drawbacks of this kind, 
were, he declared, merely just what was wanted to 
make life at Lymlngton absolutely perfect. 

During the last four years, years of consider- 
able bodily suffering, borne with great resolution, 
the central fact In his life was certainly the devoted 
affection of a friend, of genius singularly cognate 
with his own. I can, however, but lament that Mrs. 
Meynell knew him intimately solely in that sol- 
emn close of his life, in which he seemed, as Mr. 
Francis Thompson has said of him, to have drunk 

The Moonless mere of sighs, 

And paced the places infamous to tell, 

Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes. 



148 COVENTRY PATMORE 

So, emphatically, does his image not appear In 
memory to those who were close to him In the un- 
ruffled and ensphered intensity of his middle life. 
His fatal complaint, which was angina pectoris, 
gave him many warnings and long periods of res- 
pite before the end came suddenly. A little act 
of imprudence, the result of a sense of unusual 
health, led to an attack in the early morning of 
November 24, 1896, and on the 26th, after an ill- 
ness which was scarcely painful, and through which 
he was conscious of all the consolations of his re- 
ligion, he passed away. In a cardiac syncope, in his 
house at Lymington. He was nearly half-way 
through his seventy- fourth year. Almost to the 
last hour he gave Interesting evidence of the clear- 
ness of his intellect and the vigour of his will. 



CHAPTER VI 

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 

There can be no question that at the present 
day too much attention is frequently given to the 
little acts and oddities of those whose real import- 
ance lies entirely in their productions. Our biog- 
raphies tend to become anecdotages, and what is 
essential is lost in a tiresome record of what is 
accidental. The tendency of modern society is to 
take away the salient and the surprising elements 
from the lives of those whose chief mission is an 
intellectual or a moral one, and there is little that 
is not trivial or monotonous to record about most 
of our poets and philosophers. But to this rule 
every age produces eminent exceptions, and of 
these Coventry Patmore was one. To deal ex- 
clusively with his verses or, as some have wished 
to do, to soften into mediocrity the violent lines of 
his personal character, would be to stultify our 
aim. If we wish to preserve for posterity an op- 
portunity to study this extraordinary man, it is nec- 
essary that we should preserve with care the char- 
acter of his person as well as that of his works, 

149 



I50 COVENTRY PATMORE 

In dwelling faithfully upon what he was, those 
who observed him closely are not merely justified 
in setting forth their observations, but have a duty 
so to do. Patmore himself would have been the 
first to insist upon the fidelity. He was not one of 
those who wish the truth to be smothered in foolish 
posthumous flatteries; he never desired to see the 
forms of vitality attentuated, but always rein- 
forced. His grim ghost will not rise to upbraid 
the biographer who strives to paint him exactly 
as he was. 

The central Impression which long Impact with 
the mind of Coventry Patmore produced was that 
here was an example, — possibly the most remark- 
able example In England at that time, — of the in- 
tellectual and moral aristocrat. To no other man 
of his age was the general trend of the nineteenth 
century towards uniformity and solidarity so de- 
testable as It was to Patmore. The give and take 
of modern toleration, the concentrated action of 
masses of men, whose units fit into one another, 
meant absolutely nothing to him. He would aban- 
don no privilege for the general convenience; he 
watched the modern Instinct warring against the 
solitary person, instinctively so hateful to democra- 
cies, and he defied It. Defiance was not a burden 
to him; he was "ever a fighter," requiring for 
complete mental health the salubrious sensation of 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 151 

antagonism. But even here he was not pleased to 
face the crowd; he disliked Its presence. His no- 
tion of fighting was to " fire his ringing shot and 
pass." He was a militant hermit of the soul, and 
it was as a hermit-thrush that he poured out his 
songs — for himself : — 

Therefore no 'plaint be mine 

Of listeners none, 

No hope of rendered use or proud reward, 

In hasty times and hard ; 

But chants as of a lonely thrush's throat 

At latest eve, 

That does in each calm note 

Both joy and grieve ; 

Notes few and strong and fine. 

Gilt with sweet day's decline, 

And sad with promise of a different sun. 

'Mid the loud concert harsh 

Of this fog-folded marsh, 

To me, else dumb, 

Uranian Clearness, come ! 

Give me to breathe in peace and in surprise 

The light-thrill'd ether of your rarest skies. 

A certain hauteur to which these, like so many 
of his verses, testify, characterized Patmore in all 
the words and actions of his life. No one could 
enter the circle of his conversation without per- 
ceiving his pride in a sense of the distance which 
divided him, and those whom he esteemed, from 



152 



COVENTRY PATMORE 



the crowd, the vast, Indefinite plehs whom he dis- 
dained. His very cordiality, the charming sweet- 
ness of his affection, took a lustre from this general 
hauteur, since the few who were received within 
the wicket, who were allowed to share the sublime 
and embattled isolation, were flattered in their in- 
most nature by so gracious a partiality. He had 
a very strong sense of inequality. Without any- 
thing overtly arrogant, he was irresistibly con- 
scious of a sort of supernatural superiority in him- 
self. He would never have admitted it in words, 
perhaps because he would expect no sensible per- 
son to deny it. He was serene and kindly, but 
aloof; he was like a king In exile. He had some- 
thing of the conduct of a dethroned monarch, of 
one who does not expect homage or wish for It, 
but who knows that his ideas are sovereign and 
his claims invulnerable. 

His attitude to life, — at all events until the sad 
reverberation of his last years, — gave a constant 
impression of accumulated energy, a sense of pleni- 
tude. His temper was not parasitical, he did not 
lean on others or need them ; he could stand quite 
alone. In speaking and in acting he preserved a 
strong sense of his own value. It was absolutely 
necessary to his temperament to run his own race, 
to speak his own thought. To quote his own 
words, again, he held that 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 153 

Much woe that man befalls 

Who does not run when sent, nor come when Heaven calls ; 

But whether he serve God, or his own whim. 

Not matters, in the end, to any one but him ; 

And he as soon 

Shall map the other side of the Moon, 

As trace what his own deed. 

In the next chop of the chance gale, shall breed. 

This was Patmore's last word to time-servers, 
to those who bid him beware lest, in his wilfulness, 
doing and saying this or that, It might ultimately 
lead to that or this. He did not care In the very 
least, and when gentle friends like Aubrey de Vere 
entreated him to be circumspect and to spare the 
weaker brethren, Patmore turned from them In 
compassionate surprise. 

If we study this mental attitude more closely, 
we find that it denoted the exercise of a singu- 
lar moral Independence. Patmore Is not com- 
prehended unless we realize that he deliberately 
arrogated to himself the right to perform cer- 
tain intellectual acts which were of an exceptional 
nature. It appears to me that throughout his 
whole life In maturity he was training himself to 
absolute liberty In matters of will, although at the 
same time, by a paradox which must presently be 
faced, remaining strictly obedient to the laws of 
the Church of Rome. This led him to an Ingenu- 



154 



COVENTRY PATMORE 



ity of expression which sometimes appeared casuis- 
tical, but there was no real Inconsistency. His 
independence enabled him to believe that he was 
never driven along paths which seemed those of 
obedience and renunciation, but that his spirit 
leaped ahead to obey before the order was given 
and to renounce in joy before the temptation 
was formulated. His attitude to certain persons 
within his own communion showed how anxious 
he was that his freedom should not be tam- 
pered with. The hot flame of the tyrannicide 
burned in his breast, and he was ready to de- 
stroy any one who threatened his individual in- 
dependence. 

In this connexion, nothing is more amusing 
than his life-long antipathy to Cardinal Manning, 
in whom, as by an instinct, he perceived the tyrant, 
the oppressor of others' will. Patmore never fal- 
tered for a moment about Manning, whom he de- 
scribed as being " as ignorant as a child In mat- 
ters of philosophy, although his attitude on such 
questions was always arrogantly dogmatic." Mr. 
Basil Champneys has given a series of very amus- 
ing anecdotes and sayings which betray Pat- 
more's undying hatred of Manning, whom, more- 
over, he once defined to me as " the worst type 
in history of the priest-ridden atheist." This, 
no doubt, was an example of what Mr. Champneys 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 155 

excellently calls Patmore's habit of '* expressing 
himself in words which exceeded rather than fell 
short of his actual sentiments.'' But it exempli- 
fied his passionate and temperamental dislike of 
Manning, which, without question, was fostered 
by certain personal incidents connected with Pat- 
more's first and second marriages, but which I 
believe to have been yet mainly due to a part- 
ly unconscious sense of Manning's dangerous 
and insidious tendency to enslave the human 
will. 

One of the later Fathers speaks of " that ex- 
treme indifference of the human will when once 
it has been reduced and liquefied into the will of 
God." Catholic metaphysic does not say that the 
soul acquiesces in God's will, because this would 
Imply an act declaring its consent. There must 
be no act, but a total resignation, an extreme sub- 
mission, what St. Frangois de Sales calls " le 
despouillement parfaict de Fame unie a la volonte 
de Dieu." Patmore had attained a consciousness 
of something like this long before he became a 
Catholic. In 1862, after his first wife's death and 
while he was still within the Anglican communion, 
he believed that God had suddenly conferred upon 
him " that quiet personal apprehension and love 
of Him and entire submission to His will " for 
which he had so long prayed In vain. This con- 



156 COVENTRY PATMORE 

viction survived the crisis which took him over 
to Rome, and became greatly strengthened and 
extended. 

The paradox which seems offered to us by the 
steady and humble faith of a man like Patmore in 
religious matters, and his extreme self-confidence 
in everything else, is more apparent than real. 
Having satisfied himself to the full on the great 
spiritual question, being troubled by no species of 
doubt about that, his will was free to exercise It- 
self with the utmost freedom in all mundane direc- 
tions. If you firmly believe that your volition Is 
melted into God's, there is no difficulty in suppos- 
ing that if you find yourself wishing for some- 
thing or approving something, that thing Is also 
approved by God. Patmore made a tremendous 
effort not to allow the conventions of religion to 
compromise his will, and, once convinced of the 
rightness of his central orthodoxy, he had no super- 
stition about the human arrangements of his faith. 
He was always wide-awake to the dangers of 
theological charlatanry, and his outspoken remarks 
on this subject were wont to amuse his friends 
and to scandalize strangers. His careful biog- 
rapher has spoken of '' the constant depreciation 
of the moral character of the priesthood " In which 
Patmore indulged. In the last letter of his life he 
referred to Omar Khayyam's disdain of priests 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 157 

with high approval.^ He took an absolute pleas- 
ure in the incongruity between the lofty vocation 
of these agents of grace and the frailties and de- 
fects of their personal conduct. 

It is true that, as his closest friend has said, Pat- 

1 The whole of the vigorous letter in which this remark was 
made seems worthy of publication upon various grounds. It 
was written less than a week before he died. Patmore wrote 
it to explain why he was obliged to withdraw from a promise 
he had made to come up to London to attend a dinner-party. 
The vivacity and intellectual force of the language are remark- 
able in a dying man in his seventy-fourth year : — 

Lymington, Nov. 17, 1896. 
My dear Gosse, — 

I am quite a cripple to-day with sciatica. I am so sorry I 
cannot come. 

I admire FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam greatly ; but a 
comparison of FitzGerald's translation with some passages of 
a literal prose translation by Charles Pickering, in one of the 
magazines two or three years ago, convinced me that Fitz- 
Gerald had mistaken the meaning in some important points. 

Nearly all Eastern poetry is more or less mystical and ascetic; 
and wine, love and liberty seem to me, in this Poem, to be 
words for spiritual passions and apprehensions, though Fitz- 
Gerald has so translated it as to ignore and sometimes to deny 
this fact. 

He has been right, however, in giving a literal intention to 
what concerns Priests and formal religion. All Poets and 
Prophets have hated Priests, — as a class, — and it has been 
their vocation, from the beginning, to expose " Ecclesiasti- 
cism." 

Yours ever, 

Coventry Patmore. 



158 COVENTRY PATMORE 

more's '' most severe attacks upon the priests were 
as often as not prompted by a rather mischievous 
humour which led him to delight in shocking 
those " who adopted the view that all priests 
should be regarded as immaculate. 

Mr. Basil Champneys quotes a dialogue which 
he overheard between Patmore and a timid member 
of his own communion, who was, the poet thought, 
too feebly subjected to a supernatural awe of 
priests : — 

Visitor. Weren't you surprised, Mr. Patmore, 

to hear of Church being burnt? I can't 

imagine how it could have happened. 

Patmore. I know very well how it happened. 

Visitor. Oh, I do so wish you'd tell me how. 

Patmore. The priests burnt it. 

Visitor. Why, what on earth should they have 
done that for? 

Patmore. To get the insurance money. 

After this a dead pause, then: — 

Visitor. Weren't you sorry to hear that Father 
was dead ? 

Patmore. No, I was very glad. 

One hears the very voice of Patmore In this 
amusing conversation, so admirably reported. 
More serious in its scope, but of exactly the same 
kind, was his independence with respect to the 
doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Patmore accepted 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 159 

it in principle, absolutely, without discussion; but 
when it came to Pope Pius the IX's glosses upon 
it, he swept these away as " merely personal opin- 
ions of an amiable old gentleman, by which I am 
in no degree bound." 

The same haughty independence marked his 
attitude towards the practical discipline of his 
Church. He was a mystic, indeed, of the highest 
class, but he declined to accept the ordinary paths 
to ecstasy. At one point he was admirably orig- 
inal, and this claims attention in any critical survey 
of his character. The typical mystic has no pity 
for his wretched body. In the practices of a 
vehement penitence, he reduces his physical condi- 
tion to a transparency through which alone, as he 
supposes, the sacred light can shine. It is in 
ceaseless maceration, in a cloud of fatigue and 
anguish, in voluntary tribulations inflicted without 
mercy, that the saints of this extravagant type ob- 
tain their visions. St. Christina the Admirable 
broke the ice of wells in winter with blows of her 
forehead, and was rewarded by an ecstasy in which 
she experienced the seven sorrows of the Passion. 
She was an example, like so many others of her 
class, of a holiness which finds no access to the 
Divine until it can break down the walls of the vile 
cottage, " battered and decayed," which we name 
the body. 



i6o COVENTRY PATMORE 

For this kind of penitential hysteria Patmore 
had the greatest possible disdain, and he held that 
if a man cannot dream without starving himself, 
it is better not to dream at all. In the face of the 
most extraordinary stories of perfection obtained 
through vexing corporeal penitences, he remained 
unmoved. Frankly, he disliked the sterile ideas 
of remorse and despair which underlie these ex- 
travagances, and he suspected a course of disci- 
pline which reduced people to a state of extreme 
physical exhaustion. He was in nothing more 
original and daring than in his glorification of the 
Body. When the mystics had done pouring con- 
tempt and hatred upon it, he took his turn and 
addressed it as — 

Creation's and Creator's crowning good ; 

Wall of infinitude ; 

Foundation of the sky, 

In Heaven forecast, 

And longed for from eternity . . , 

Reverberating dome, 

Of music cunningly-built home 

Against the void and indolent disgrace 

Of unresponsive space ; 

Little sequestered pleasure-house 

For God and for His spouse. 

We need feel no surprise that the poet who 
could thus address the human body was anxious 
not to confound the lovely vision which he himself 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS i6i 

enjoyed with the haggard and hysterical results 
of exhaustion and impoverishment. In his intrepid 
private conversation, Patmore never hesitated to 
pour scorn upon the anaemic ideal of the ordinary 
Catholic visionary. • 

In order to obtain the full effects of Imagina- 
tion in its active state, and to enjoy undisturbed 
his ecstatic visions of the soul's mystic union with 
God, Patmore was in the habit of withdrawing 
to some monastery for a certain part of each year. 
The custom of going into " retreat 'Ms a common 
one among pious persons, who seek a period of 
retirement that they may devote themselves to 
self-examination and to special prayer. Patmore, 
who did nothing like other people, did not under- 
stand his " retreats " in this sense. He started 
for Pontypool or Pantasaph as a hardly-worked 
man starts for a holiday. He was wont to arrive 
among the monks in the highest animal spirits, — 
as he himself said, " quite Mark Tapley-ish." 
He was a welcome guest at a monastery, and I 
suppose that he appeared on these occasions at his 
very best. He laughingly used to complain that 
the monks fed him up as if he were a pig being 
fattened for the fair. Presently his spirits would 
sober down; he would become impatient of seeing 
too much of his innocent hosts, and the real busi- 
ness of the " retreat " would begin. He would 



1 62 COVENTRY PATMORE 

wrap himself round with solitude, until he experi- 
enced great joy and rest in his calm surroundings; 
then he would set himself to consider God in sev- 
eral of His infinite perfections. I recollect Pat- 
more's making a distinction between meditation 
and contemplation. He remarked very justly, that 
meditation was a painful business, attended by 
labour and travail of the mind. These monastic 
" retreats " were occasions of rest, and he liked 
his thoughts to float passively on a stream of con- 
templation. Throughout, in these retirements, he 
preserved a wholesome and gay severity, without 
any species of religious pedantry. 

The openness of his mind, where his curious 
prejudices did not happen to Interfere, was al- 
ways noticeable. His sympathy embraced Emer- 
son, Swedenborg, Pascal and even Schopenhauer. 
With some of these it might seem difficult to con- 
nect the tastes of Patmore in any reasonable degree. 
But In the case of Swedenborg he was attracted by 
the closeness of his visionary teaching to that of 
the Catholic Church, although It was reached from 
an opposite point of view. " I never tire of read- 
ing Swedenborg," Patmore wrote; "he is un- 
fathomably profound and yet simple. I came on 
a passage . . . which I don't know how to 
admire enough for Its surpassing Insight Into truth 
and for its consistence with and development of 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 163 

Catholic truth. . . . You will think it all very 
odd at first, but, after you have got used to the 
queerness, you will find that it abounds with per- 
ception of the truth to a degree unparalleled per- 
haps in uninspired writing." What pleased him 
in Pascal was the splendid evidence that great 
thinker gives of the possibility of conciliating faith 
and reason in their fullest sense. With the scorn 
of Pascal for the Jesuit Fathers, for their political 
piety and their casuistical morals, Patmore had an 
instinctive sympathy. When he himself was re- 
proved for boldness in his expressions about the 
mysteries of the faith, he could hardly have found 
words which would better express his feelings than 
those in which Pascal rebuffed the suggestion that 
he should withdraw the Provinciales. So might 
Patmore have replied, about his own Psyche odes, 
" Loin de m'en repentir, si j'etais a les faire, je les 
ferais encore plus fortes." 

A certain pessimism in general matters, united 
to or imposed upon his extraordinary optimism in 
particular instances, led Patmore to sympathize 
with those who have despaired of the system of 
human institutions. He was drawn with a vehe- 
ment attraction to the dark philosophy of Schopen- 
hauer, of whom he was one of the earliest students 
in this country. The tremendous effort which Pat- 
more was always making to prevent his religious 



1 64 COVENTRY PATMORE 

faith from compromising his intellectual judgment 
enabled him to tolerate the apparent atheism in 
the German philosopher's system. But it Is very 
curious to notice that Patmore, like Nietzsche long 
afterwards (In 1888), recognized in Schopenhauer 
an element which his general readers were far 
from observing. Each of them, from his diametri- 
cally opposite view, instinctively detected what was 
still Christian in Schopenhauer, and observed how 
much he continued to be dominated by Christian 
formulas. There is something humorous In find- 
ing an Intellectual opinion shared in Isolation by 
Patmore and — by Nietzsche! But the bellicose 
element in the former would probably have found 
something to sympathize with even in the violence 
of the latter. 

In the ordinary intercourse of life It was Im- 
possible that Patmore should not be frequently 
misunderstood by those who did not appreciate his 
humour or who had no sense of fun themselves. 
He was mischievously contradictory, paradoxical 
and arbitrary, and he had a violent hatred for 
" sentimental faddists, humanitarians, anti-tobac- 
conists and teetotalers." Yet he could be ex- 
tremely sentimental himself; he was gentle and 
Indulgent to animals; and few men of his genera- 
tion indulged more sparingly in the legitimate 
stimulus of wine. But in all these movements he 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 165 

saw an interference with personal freedom of 
action, a thing for which he was disposed to fight 
in the last trench. He was like the late Archbishop 
Magee, he would rather see England free than 
England sober. He pushed his argument to an 
extreme : — 

" The bank-holidays," he wrote, "are a pro- 
digious nuisance. The whole population of Eng- 
land seems now to be chronically drunk every 
Saturday, Sunday and Monday, Feast-day or Fast. 
It is very lucky. Nothing but universal drunken- 
ness among the labouring classes can keep them 
from making use, i.e. abuse, of the new political 
power. It will be an unhappy day for England 
when the mechanic takes to becoming a sober, re- 
spectable man." 

These are dark sayings, for Patmore was 

One, with the abysmal scorn of good for ill, 
Smiting the brutish ear with doctrine hard, 

but they will not be misunderstood by any one 
who has mastered the political doctrine of the 
Odes, and who recognizes that Patmore believed 
our only hope of temporary national happiness 
to exist in stopping or hampering the results of 
the legislation of 1867. To him the effect of ex- 
tended suffrage was inevitably an " unsanctioned " 
guidance of the ship of State : — 



1 66 COVENTRY PATMORE 

helmless on the swelling tide 
Of that presumptuous sea, 
Unlit by sun or moon, yet inly bright 
With Hghts innumerable that give no light. 
Flames of corrupted will and scorn of right, 
Rejoicing to be free. 

He had an exaggerated way of saying all things, 
great and small. If he heard a blackcap singing 
in the garden it became at once a nightingale, and 
in describing it a few hours later it became " a 
chorus of five or six nightingales." He could not 
moderate his praise or blame. Instances of the 
latter have been given; one of the former, very 
characteristic, occurs to me. In the presence of 
a number of men of letters, Patmore mentioned an 
accomplished writer who was an intimate friend of 
his. The conversation passed to the lyrical poems 
of Herrick, whereupon Patmore, in his most posi- 
tive manner, exclaimed, " By the side of , 

Herrick was nothing but a brilliant insect ! " 
There was a universal murmur of indignant pro- 
test. Patmore pursed up his lips, blinked his eyes 
and said nothing. The conversation proceeded, 
and an opinion of Goethe's was presently quoted. 
Then Patmore lifted up his voice and cried: — 

" By the side of , Goethe was nothing but a 

brilliant insect! " This was an instance of the 
blind violence of his humour, perhaps at its worst. 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 167 

It was an attempt to take opinion by storm and to 
triumph over the bewilderment of his auditors; and 
truly, in analyzing such preposterous utterances, It 
was often difficult to know how much was conscious 
fun and how much mere daredevil wilfulness. 

His humour often took the form of epigrams 
or lampoons, by far the most famous of which 
was that which he wrote in August, 1870, on occa- 
sion of the Emperor William's famous telegram 
from Woerth: — 

This is to say, my dear Augusta, 
WeVe had another awful buster : 
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below ! 
Thank God from whom all blessings flow. 

Less known is a quatrain which he threw off on 
finding his mystical poems misunderstood by certain 
commonplace members of his own communion: — 

A bee upon a briar-rose hung 

And wild with pleasure suck'd and kiss'd ; 
A flesh-fly near, with snout in dung, 

Sneer'd, " What a Transcendentalist ! " 

Nor did he spare Science, with which in later 
years he had entirely lost his early sympathy : — 

Science, the agile ape, may well 

Up in his tree thus grin and grind his teeth 

At us beneath, 

The wearers of the bay and asphodel, 

Laughing to be his butts. 

And gathering up for use his ill-aim'd cocoanuts. 



1 68 COVENTRY PATMORE 

There was some perversity In this also. He dls- 
hked '* gush," and there Is a story of his visiting 
Greenwich Observatory in company with Aubrey 
de Vere. They were shown through the telescope 
a new comet and other fine things, which filled 
them both with exultation, but De Vere unfor- 
tunately giving voice to his enthusiasm about the 
bigness of the starry heavens on the way home, 
Patmore suddenly " dried up," and maintained 
that the stars were only created '* to make dirt 
cheap." 

He cultivated the habit of writing occasional 
verses of compliment or humour, and it was no- 
ticeable that, however slight these were, they re- 
tained the general features of his style. I am per- 
mitted to print, for the first time, a playful address 
to a little girl, the daughter of one of his friends, 
and It will be observed that the technique of this 
trifle closely resembles that of some of Patmore's 
most mystical lyrics : — 

To Miss "Josephine Knowles. 

A railway car, on Sandy Down, 
With you, were Palace, Realm and Crown ; 
And tripe and onions, cooked by you. 
Ambrosia were and honey-dew ; 
Whene'er you spin upon your bike, 
I'll trot behind, your faithful tyke. 
Water inflames a mighty fire. 
So shall I but the more admire 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 169 

The more you jump the old world's traces 

With such exasperating graces ; 

Yea, every Tory taste I'll banish 

The moment Josephine turns mannish, 

And if I write more poetry, 

" The Angel on the Bike " 'twill be ! 

C. P, 
Feb., 1896. 



The personal appearance of Coventry Patmore 
has, most fortunately, been secured for posterity 
by the art of one of the most gifted of living 
artists, Mr. John S. Sargent, R.A. Patmore had 
a great admiration for Mr. Sargent^s work; he 
wrote: — *' He seems to me to be the greatest, not 
only of living English portrait painters, but of all 
English portrait painters." This was certainly 
a very happy spirit In which to approach the studio, 
and this enthusiastic appreciation survived the 
weariness of " sittings." These began in June, 
1894, and on September 7 Patmore announced the 
completion of the work as follows: '' As you were 
Instrumental In getting the portrait done, I ought 
to tell you that It is now finished to the satisfac- 
tion, and far more than satisfaction, of every one 
— Including the painter — who has seen it. It will 
be, simply as a work of art, the picture of the 
Academy," where, indeed. In 1895, It atracted uni- 
versal admiration. In the same month of Septem- 



I70 COVENTRY PATMORE 

ber, 1894, Mr. Sargent, saying that he had only 
done half of Patmore as yet, painted a second 
portrait, and later on the poet came up to town to 
sit for the Prophet Ezekiel in that great decorative 
composition which Mr. Sargent was painting for 
the Boston Library. There are, therefore, three 
portraits — the most important of them already 
transferred to the National Portrait Gallery — 
in which a hand of consummate power has fixed 
for ever upon canvas the apocalyptical old age of 
Coventry Patmore. 

Splendid as these portraits are, however, and 
intimately true of the poet's latest phase, it is neces- 
sary to insist that he was not always thus ragged 
and vulturine, not always such a miraculous por- 
tent of gnarled mandible and shaken plumage. 
Mr. Basil Champneys gives a sketch of him in 
the prime of life, at about the age of forty: — 

" It must, I think, have been early in 1864, that 
walking from Hampstead to Highgate in company 
with a friend who knew him, I caught sight at the 
corner of Caen Wood of a sombre, stately, solitary 
figure dressed in deep mourning. My friend in- 
troduced him as Mr. Coventry Patmore, and 
though but few words passed, what little he said 
left an impression of sadness, gravity and extreme 
reticence, entirely consonant to his appearance. 
He seemed as one who had passed through poig- 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 171 

nant sorrow with unimpaired manliness and with 
increase of dignity. His personal appearance, so 
far as I can recall it, was then a good deal like the 
picture painted by Mr. John Brett (in 1855), 
and the more salient characteristics with which I 
was afterwards so familiar were rather indicated 
than developed." 

They had become much more developed when 
I saw him first in 1879, but they were still far 
from giving him that aspect of a wild crane In the 
wilderness which Mr. Sargent's marvellous por- 
trait will pass down to posterity. He was exceed- 
ingly unlike other people, of course, even then, but 
his face possessed quite as much beauty as strange^ 
ness. Three things were in those days particularly 
noticeable in the head of Coventry Patmore: the 
vast convex brows, arched with vision; the bright, 
shrewd, bluish-grey eyes, the outer fold of one eye- 
lid permanently and humorously drooping; and the 
wilful, sensuous mouth. These three seemed ever 
at war among themselves ; they spoke three differ- 
ent tongues; they proclaimed a man of dreams, a 
canny man of business, a man of vehement physical 
determination. It was the harmony of these in 
apparently discordant contrast which made the 
face so fascinating ; the dwellers under this strange 
mask were three, and the problem was how they 
contrived the common life. The same incongruity 



172 COVENTRY PATMORE 

pervaded all the poet's figure. When at rest, stand- 
ing or sitting, he was remarkably graceful, falling 
easily into languid, undulating poses. No sooner 
did he begin to walk than he became grotesque at 
once, the long, thin neck thrust out, the angularity 
of the limbs emphasized in every rapid, inelegant 
movement. Sailing along the Parade at Hastings, 
his hands deep in the pockets of his short, black- 
velvet jacket, his grey curls escaping from under a 
broad, soft wide-awake hat, his long, thin legs like 
compasses measuring the miles, his fancy mani- 
festly " reaching to some great world in ungauged 
darkness hid," Coventry Patmore was an appari- 
tion never to be forgotten. 

His relations with others partook of the Incon- 
gruity which I have tried to note In his personal 
appearance. On one side, Patmore was sociable up 
to the very last, pleased to meet strangers, to feel 
the movement of young persons circling around 
him; on another, he was averse to companionship, 
a solitary, a hermit. He loved the society of the 
ladies of his family, but he was something of a 
Pacha even there. They were not expected to dis- 
turb his day dream, and sometimes he brusquely 
shook them off him. Then he would write to 
some male friend: " It would be a charity If you 
would come down now and then on Saturday and 
stay till Monday. I live all my days in a wilder- 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 173 

ness of fair women, and I long for some male 
chat." Or, in these moods, he would break away 
altogether and come up to town, descending sud- 
denly on some active friend, who would be always 
delighted, of course, to see him, but embarrassed, 
in the hurly-burly of business, to know what to 
do with this grim pilgrim who would sit there for 
hours, winking, blinking, smoking innumerable 
cigarettes, and saying next to nothing. Little 
parties suddenly collected to meet Patmore at 
luncheon or dinner were found to be the most suc- 
cessful form of entertainment; for though he would 
sometimes scarcely say a word, or would wither 
conversation by some paradox ending in a crackle 
and a cough, it was discovered that he believed 
himself to have been almost indecorously spark- 
ling on these occasions, and would long afterwards 
refer to a very dull, small dinner as " that fear- 
ful dissipation." 

He was so very loyal to his restricted friend- 
ships, that a fresh incongruity is to be traced in 
the notorious fact that he had sacrificed more 
illustrious friends on the altar of caprice than 
any other man in England. He had been intimate 
with Tennyson, Emerson, Browning, Rossetti, 
Millais, and Woolner, yet each of these intimacies 
ceased as time went on, and each was broken off 
or dropped by Patmore. He got a reputation in 



174 COVENTRY PATMORE 

some quarters for churlishness, which It is not very 
easy to explain away, yet which he did not quite 
deserve. The cessation of these relationships was 
due to several causes. In the cases of Tennyson, 
and in lesser measure of Ruskin, the youthful 
spirit of idolatry had given place to a mature in- 
dependence not so agreeable to the idol. In these, 
and similar instances, when the tie had become 
irksome, it was snapped by what was called a 
*' quarrel," an incident often of highly mysterious 
character. Every one who knew Patmore well has 
heard him tell the story of his " quarrel " with 
Tennyson. I was at pains to sift this anecdote, 
and was able to prove to my own satisfaction that 
it could not have happened. It was simply, I 
think, a casuistical mode of freeing Patmore's 
memory from the burden of Tennyson's influence. 
In this connexion, as Patmore's absence from 
Tennyson's funeral has been commented on, I am 
glad to take this opportunity of explaining it. Pat- 
more was so anxious to be present that he came to 
London for the purpose, without waiting for the 
indispensable card of invitation. This latter was 
sent to Hastings by mistake, and thence to Lyming- 
ton, and thence to town, reaching Patmore an hour 
after the ceremony began In the Abbey. Two 
years before Tennyson's death, the old friends 
exchanged kindly greetings through a third per- 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 175 

son, but neither would write first to the other, and 
they met no more. 

Another cause for the rupture of certain early 
friendships was religious sentiment. It must never 
be forgotten that Patmore was not merely a Cath- 
olic, but an enthusiastically convinced and stren- 
uous one. His conversion to Rome severed many 
old ties, and he was not anxious that these should 
be renewed. His attitude to Rossetti was typical. 
He spoke of no one with more heat of resentment 
than of Rossetti; I remember that, on occasion of 
that poet's death, in 1882, I was bewildered by 
Patmore's expressions. He drew himself up in 
his chair, his eyes blazed, he was like the Prophet 
Ezeklel in his denunciation. He considered, so he 
explained, that Rossetti, more than any other man 
since the great old artist-age, had been dowered 
with insight Into spiritual mysteries, that the Ark 
of passion had been delivered Into his hands and 
that he had played with it, had used it to serve his 
curiosity and his vanity, had profaned the Holy of 
Holies; that he was Uzzah and Pandarus, and 
that there was no forgiveness for him anywhere. 
And even Ruskin, though in lesser degree, and 
with far less seriousness, for the affection here 
lasted warmly to the end, came In for fantastic de- 
nunciation. In these sallies, fun and earnest were 
Indlssolubly mixed, yet it was very far Indeed from 
being all fun. 



176 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Patmore's austerity being, as it was, strongly 
emphasized by his candour of speech and virile in- 
tellectual independence, it is well to note that he 
was by no means, at least in the Puritan sense, 
ascetic. Nor, although so passionately a Catholic 
in all the fibres of his being, did he limit his sym- 
pathies to his own order. On the contrary, he 
was remarkably ready to annex to Catholicism 
whatever he approved of. The oddest example of 
this which I recollect, was the remark, to which I 
have already made some reference, which he 
once made about the boudoir novelists of the 
eighteenth century, Crebillon pis and Moliere and 
Voisenon, " They are not nearly so vile as people 
pretend to think; there is a great deal that is 
Catholic in their conception of love.'' And Plato 
had his Catholic touches in the Symposium^ and all 
the first pagan rapture In physical beauty was 
Catholic too. For a long time Patmore hesitated 
whether he should hang on the low landing which 
faced his front door at Hastings a life-size cast of 
the Venus of Milo or a reproduction of the San 
Sisto Madonna. The ladles of the household much 
preferring the latter, It was at length put up, but 
Patmore remarked to me, with a sigh, " The Venus 
would have been at least as Catholic." In all these 
Instances he perceived in the innocent, sensuous 
form a symbol which but added a whispered and 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 177 

exterior benediction to that solemn sacrament of 
marriage, which held so lofty a place In his con- 
ception of spiritual life. Greek sculptors, poets of 
the Renaissance, even the Creblllons of the world 
of patch and powder, seemed, to his broad vision, 
like those wild men who knelt In the narthex of an 
ancient Christian church, though they might never 
penetrate Into the fane Itself. 

A singular characteristic of Patmore's, which 
demands record, were his occasional bursts of 
wagglshness In reference to things which are not 
merely of solemn Import, but to no one of more 
genuine solemnity than to himself. He once said 
to me. In this connexion, " No one Is thoroughly 
convinced of the truth of his religion who is afraid 
to joke about It, just as no man can tease a woman 
with such Impunity as he who Is perfectly convinced 
of her love." He did not scruple to Invent Cath- 
olic legends, some of which are now, we are told, 
in steady circulation among the devout. In par- 
ticular, I remember a story about the dormouse, 
who was created with a naked tall like a rat, but 
who, seeing Adam and Eve eating the apple, and 
being conscious of a sinful longing, pressed what 
tail he had to his eyes to shut out temptation. He 
was instantly rewarded by the not very silky brush 
which has been the pride of his descendants. This 
Patmore invented, circulated, and had the ex- 



1 78 COVENTRY PATMORE 

quislte pleasure — so, at least, he affirmed — of 
seeing adopted Into works of Catholic tradition. 

It is entertaining to those who knew Coventry 
Patmore well to hear him conjectured of by those 
who never saw him as " mild " or " namby- 
pamby." In point of fact, he was the most mas- 
terful of men, the very type of that lofty, moral 
arrogance which antiquity Identified with the 
thought of Archllochus. This partly essential, 
partly exterior tendency to tyrannize, to be a law 
to himself and others, to cut all knots whatsoever 
with a single, final slash of that stringent tongue of 
his, was, indeed, a snare to him. It obscured too 
often the sunshine of his sensitive tenderness, and 
in such poems as " The Toys " and " If I were 
Dead '' a piteous proof is offered to us that he was 
conscious of this. His hand was apt to be too 
heavy In reproof; what to himself seemed tempered 
by its humorous exaggeration fell upon the cul- 
prit with a crushing weight. And then Patmore 
would be sorry for his anger, and angry with him- 
self for being sorry, until the fountains that should 
have been sweet and clear were bitter and turbid 
with conflicting emotion. 

Rarely has a knowledge of the man been more 
essential to the comprehension of his writings than 
was the case with Coventry Patmore. To under- 
stand the poems, some vision of the angular, vivid, 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 179 

discordant, and yet exquisitely fascinating person 
who composed them Is necessary. During a great 
portion of his life, the genius of Patmore was under 
an almost unbroken cloud; It was the object of 
ridicule and rebuke; even now, when honour Is 
generally paid to his name, the extraordinary orig- 
inality and force of his best work Is properly appre- 
ciated by but few. It is my firm conviction that 
the influence of Coventry Patmore, as the master- 
psychologist of love, human and divine, is destined 
steadily to increase, and that a future generation 
will look back to him with a mingled homage and 
curiosity when many of those whose doings now 
fill the columns of our newspapers are forgotten. 
For, in this composite age of ours, when all things 
and people are apt to seem repetitions of people 
and things which amused some previous generation, 
Coventry Patmore contrived, unconsciously, to give 
the impression of being, like the Phoenix of fable, 
the solitary specimen of an unrelated species. 



CHAPTER VII 

LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 

When we take into consideration the splendid 
ambition of Coventry Patmore and the prolonged 
duration of his life, it is very curious to observe 
that he never contrived to finish a single work. 
We have seen that The Angel in the House, which 
was to have consisted of six sections, was dropped 
in 1863 at the conclusion of the fourth. The pres- 
ent collection of odes entitled The Unknown Eros 
is but a chain of stray fragments out of the poem 
on Divine Love which as late as 1866 he was still 
endeavouring to complete. Patmore's third great 
design, the poem on the Marriage of the Blessed 
Virgin, of which In 1870 he was "laying the 
foundation broad and deep," never rose at all from 
Its too-ambitious basis. The causes of this failure 
to give complete expression to his own genius were 
many. But the most Important of them, I think, 
was the excessive emotion which Patmore threw 
Into his imaginative experience. Other poets of 
his age, notably Tennyson and Browning, made 

180 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS i8i 

poetry their business. They forced the ecstasy 
they felt into the channels of their art, and mas- 
tered it, instead of allowing it to master them. 

Patmore, though not less of a bard than these 
men, was less of an artist. He had not the gift 
of imaginative storage; he could not, as Tennyson 
did, ponder for weeks on the execution of a theme, 
gradually building up the structure of his poem. 
Patmore was in his essence an Improvisatore, only 
without the lightness, the fluidity, of the improvisa- 
tore. He improvised dark sayings, and flashed out 
gnomic prophecies in his cave. But he could only 
write when the intolerable inspiration descended 
upon him, and he had no power of storing poetic 
material. He excused his silence, on one occasion, 
by saying that one song, or a succession of songs, 
would not express what he felt; nothing but " the 
simultaneous utterance of many songs in different 
directions " could serve to relieve his emotion, 
which was, therefore, by a " mortal impossibility," 
stifled, instead of flowing into song. When the 
impulse was upon him, he wrote with a tremendous 
energy and self-gratulation, almost like a man con- 
sciously breathed into by a god. But this ecstasy 
could never be sustained, and in the deep depres- 
sion which followed the moment of exaltation he 
sank to the belief that he was " nothing but a mis- 
erable self-deluded poetaster." 



1 82 COVENTRY PATMORE 

This, as the experienced reader will note, Is a 
symptom by which we diagnose the born lyrist. 
This reaction, this agonized query, 

where slept thine ire, 
When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath, 

Thy laurel, thy glory, 

The light of thy story, 
Or was I a worm, too low-creeping for death? 

O Delphic Apollo I 

are the very signs-manual of the malady of the 
accredited singer, who is lifted high only to be 
dashed down the lower. It is to this tempera- 
ment, without question, that we owe some of those 
bursts of song which still stir the very depths of 
our being after centuries of silence. But the curi- 
ous thing is that Patmore never recognized in him- 
self the singer pure and simple ; he desired to excel 
In epic, gnomic and didactic poetry, and for success 
In these it Is plain that he had not the temperament. 
He never realized this fact, and he even endeav- 
oured to explain away the evidences of it. It Is 
impossible to overlook the repeated occasions on 
which he asserts that his writings were the result 
of a prolonged effort of the Intellect. Evidently 
he wished that they should be, and believed that 
they were. He wrote that every one of his mature 
books had been written " after many years of re- 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 183 

flection on its subject," and in a sense this was 
doubtless true, but not In the sense he Intended. It 
was in a mood of far juster self-observation that he 
spoke of the " discovery of the mode of treating a 
subject '' being with him " co-Instantaneous with 
the actual composition." That Is the true expe- 
rience of the lyrist, but this is not how epic and 
philosophical poetry are written. 

Patmore was painfully aware that Inspiration 
came to him fitfully and rarely, and that it left him 
soon. A fine pride preserved him from going on 
for a moment after he was conscious that the sud- 
den illumination had been removed. His best 
things, he knew, had been written most quickly; 
several of his finest odes in less than two hours 
each. His attitude to poetry was very noble ; much 
as he longed to express his mission, as he regarded 
it, he would steadily maintain a literary conscience. 
In 1868 he wrote, '* Though, of course, I may not 
be a competent judge of how good my best is, I am 
sure that I have given the world nothing but my 
best." He long hoped that with age a greater free- 
dom would settle upon him, that the heavenly visi- 
tant might be induced to come oftener, and to stay 
longer. He thought that each poet had a certain 
amount of original poetry in him, and that if he 
did not get It out of himself in his spring or sum- 
mer, he might hope to do so in his autumn. But 



1 84 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Patmore's autumn brought a more continuous 
silence, and to the final edition of 1886 he prefixed 
the proud simplicity of this brief confession : — 

" I have written little, but it is all my best; I 
have never spoken when I had nothing to say, 
nor spared time or labour to make my words true. 
I have respected posterity, and, should there be a 
posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope 
that it will respect me.'* 

There is no question that Patmore was sincere in 
this conception of his own artistic rectitude, and 
it is true that he spent a great deal of time in revis- 
ing and altering what he had written. But it was 
an epithet, the turn of a phrase, or the arrangement 
of a rhyme that he changed, and it was very curious 
that the repeated editions of his early poetry con- 
tinue to present us with blemishes which are of an 
essential kind. These were. In not a few Instances, 
pointed out to him by critical acquaintances. Yet 
they were seldom removed. The fact was that 
Patmore, with the best will In the world, was un- 
able to perceive them, and when they were pointed 
out to him he defended them, not with obstinate 
vanity, but with a blank bewilderment. When the 
revival of Patmore's fame began, about 1885, the 
new generation of admirers, whose opinion was 
founded upon Amelia and The Unknown Eros, 
were somewhat scandalized at the connubial vapid- 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 185 

ities of the plot of The Angel in the House. One 
of the most ardent of these critics felt obliged to 
insist upon the fact that " this laureate of the tea- 
table, with his humdrum stories of girls that smell 
of bread and butter, is in his inmost heart the most 
arrogant and visionary of mystics." That was all 
very well, but Patmore, while accepting the second 
clause of this statement, repudiated the former. 
He could not be persuaded of its truth, although 
it is no longer necessary to quote examples of the 
extremely pedestrian narrative which marred the 
early poems. They cannot be defended, and the 
only interest they possess lies in the fact that Pat- 
more continued to defend them. The matter is 
summed up in a witty, if rather cruel, sentence by 
Dr. Garnett, when he tells us that Patmore " had 
no perception of the sublime In other men's writ- 
ings or of the ridiculous in his own." 

In the early narrative poems, published at inter- 
vals between 1844 ^i^d 1863, what is now attrac- 
tive to the reader is always the lyrical setting. This 
is devoted almost exclusively to an analysis of ama- 
tory instinct In its most guileless and paradisal 
forms. The portraiture of woman as a sort of 
household Madonna is carried through with great 
ingenuity. In those days the conception of love 
which Patmore had formed was still very simple; 
it scarcely passed beyond the worship of household 



1 86 COVENTRY PATMORE 

beauty. A recent French writer on English life, 
M. Robert d'Humleres, has observed that our na- 
tion VL aime pas la femme hors de sa maison, and 
bases upon this cloistered habit some reflections 
upon the chastity of English Imaginative literature. 
If there Is some truth In this observation, then that 
erotic idealism of respect reaches its most Intense 
expression In The Angel in the House^ and It Is In 
this that the element of lasting popularity In that 
poem resides. Nor would the element be reduced 
by the fact that Patmore's conception of this rev- 
erence In love Is not genuinely spiritual, but phys- 
ical and egotistical. This was what caused him so 
great a confusion when he definitely joined the 
Roman communion, since Catholic doctrine looks 
askance at any expression of complaisance with 
what Is either sensual or mortal. Patmore's In- 
genuity was able to discover a way out of his di- 
lemma; he persuaded himself that his conception 
of love embraced a sentiment of sacrifice accepted 
which endowed it with spirituality. 

The reader of to-day will not be troubled by 
such scruples, and for him the difficulty of enjoy- 
ing Patmore's early poems will be that of being in- 
terested In virtue which Is so tamely happy and so 
easily rewarded. The household atmosphere in 
these works is like that in some of the domestic 
pictures of the period, an air loaded with the per- 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 187 

fume of pinks and sweet peas, in some deep garden 
where no wind ever blows and where it is always 
afternoon. The Vicar's daughters arrive to play 
the old simple form of early Victorian croquet; 
their crinolines cluster around the curate, who takes 
advantage of that shelter to cheat a little when his 
turn comes round; there Is a faint buzzing of in- 
sects, the click of the mallets on the balls, an Inno- 
cent light-hearted chatter, and Mamma is always 
not far off, in an easy chair, knitting some object 
out of rainbow-coloured wools. If a couple wan- 
ders off for a little while among the currant bushes, 
It is only In response 

To urgent pleas and promise to behave 
As She were there. 

Between all this warm sweetness and the sharp, 
glacial air of the Odes, there seems to lie a chasm, 
but it is bridged over by Amelia^ In several re- 
spects the most wonderful of Patmore's produc- 
tions. It was written In four days at the begin- 
ning of 1878, and is, therefore, among the latest 
of his poetical writings. Notwithstanding this 
fact. It must be treated as a link between the nar- 
ratives of the poet's Protestant period, and the 
odes of Catholic Inspiration which date from 1864 
onwards. 

A word which has been very laxly used in nine- 



1 88 COVENTRY PATMORE 

teenth-century is exactly fitted to describe Amelia. 
That poem is in the strictest sense an idyl, a short 
ornamented narrative on a rustic subject; it be- 
longs to the same rural type as the Komastes of 
Theocritus, and it blends in a like degree the char- 
acter of the little epic with that of the ode. Very 
few modern pieces bear such happy trace of obe- 
dience to Wordsworth's direction that the poet 
should write with his eye upon the object. The 
whole atmosphere of Amelia, of its locality, of its 
ethics, of its language, of its landscape, is strictly 
individual. To speak first of its locality, though 
no place is mentioned, we identify at once " the 
little, bright, surf-breathing town," that 

Gathers its skirts against the gorse-lit down 
And scatters gardens o*er the southern lea, 

as unquestionably Hastings, and every slight epi- 
thet that follows confirms the impression. The 
landscape is not less clearly individual. As the 
lovers walk through it, the scene takes certain as- 
pects which are neither accidental nor indifferent, 
but each phase of which has its moral significance. 
In the following passage, the reader who does not 
seek to inquire deeply may be charmed with the 
freshness of a spring picture; to the closer student 
every segment of the description is charged with 
symbolism : — 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 189 

And so we went alone 
By walls o'er which the lilac's numerous plume 
Shook down perfume ; 
Trim plots close blown 
With daisies, in conspicuous myriads seen, 
Engross'd each one 

With single ardour for her spouse, the sun ; 
Garths in their glad array 
Of white and ruddy branch, auroral, gay, 
With azure chill the maiden flow'r between ; 
Meadows of fervid green. 
With sometime-sudden prospect of untold 
Cowslips, like chance-found gold ; 
And broadcast buttercups at joyful gaze. 
Rending the air with praise, 
Like the six-hundred-thousand voiced shout 
Of Jacob camp'd in Midian put to rout ; 
Then through the Park, 
Where Spring to livelier gloom 
Quicken'd the cedars dark, 
And, 'gainst the clear sky cold, 
Which shone afar 
Crowded with sunny alps oracular, 
Great chestnuts raised themselves abroad like cliffs of 
bloom. 

The subject of Amelia is not less original than 
Its treatment. Never did a poet choose a theme 
more perilous, or one which must depend for Its 
success more entirely on the sincerity of his thought 
and the distinction of his language. The hero of 
the poem is a man no longer quite young, who has 



I90 COVENTRY PATMORE 

been betrothed (Patmore shrank, perhaps judi- 
ciously, from saying married) to a certain MIllI- 
cent. She has died and has been burled In the 
churchyard close by. After a period of deep sor- 
row, he falls In love again, this time with one of a 
simple birth, and almost a child, Amelia. On the 
earliest occasion when her careful mother, a widow, 
allows him to take Amelia for a walk, he conducts 
her over the cliffs to the grave of Mllllcent. The 
position Is one eminently natural, eminently pa- 
thetic, but It lies so far removed from the conven- 
tional haunts of the Muses that the courage of Pat- 
more In adopting It Is much to be admired. One 
conceives the cachlnnatlon of the Phlhstlnes at the 
Idea of an ode about a man whose Idea of a pleas- 
ant walk for a young girl to whom he Is just 
engaged Is to show her the tombstone of her 
predecessor. Patmore, extremely moved by per- 
sonal emotion, and supported by his own strange 
experience, was Indifferent to ridicule. Nor can 
any sober critic read the lines which describe the 
approach of Amelia to the grave of Mllllcent with- 
out admitting that he nobly justified his boldness — 

While, th refore, now 

Her pensive footsteps stirr*d 

The darneird garden of unheedful death, 

She ask'd what Millicent was like, and heard 

Of eyes like hers, and honeysuckle breath, 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 191 

And of a wiser than a woman's brow, 

Yet fill'd with only woman's love, and how 

An incidental greatness character'd 

Her unconsider'd ways. 

But all my praise 

Amelia thought too slight for Millicenty 

And on my lovelier-freighted arm she leant 

For more attent ; 

And the tea-rose I gave 

To deck her breast, she dropp'd upon the grave. 

The passage must be read in its entirety, but 
nowhere does Patmore give more splendid evidence 
of his delicate and subtle insight into the female 
heart than in the portraits which he contrives to 
indicate of the two maidens, each so demure, sweet 
and pathetic, and yet each so utterly unlike the 
other. 

In Amelia the style of Patmore reaches almost 
its highest level of nervous vigour. The form of 
verse which he adopts is one which was introduced 
into English literature by Cowley, with whom, as 
I have already said, Patmore had considerable 
affinities. The later poet was born into an age of 
happier taste, and was forewarned against the 
errors of his predecessor. Like Cowley, however, 
he had evidently been a close student of Spenser, 
and the majesty of the Prothalamion has left its 
stamp upon its style. There is, too, sometimes a 
murmur here of that music of Comus and Lycidas 



192 COVENTRY PATMORE 

which Is often heard more loudly In The Unknown 
Eros, But Spenser Is the model, if model be not 
too strong a word for an influence so Illusive, an 
influence which tinges Amelia as that of Tennyson 
tinged The Angel in the House, In neither case 
did the tone approach Imitation or detract from 
Patmore's originality. He had been walking in 
these poets' gardens, but he brought back no blos- 
soms with him; the most that could be urged was 
that his hands still carried the perfume of their 
roses. 

It is to be noted that the peculiar ecstasy in the 
midst of which Patmore considered that his poetical 
talent descended upon him, accompanied the com- 
position of Amelia to an unusual degree. It was 
partly for this reason, no doubt, that he always re- 
garded it as the most successful of his writings, 
a view in which criticism will be not disinclined to 
agree with him. In fact, there Is something in this 
poem which is positively tantalizing, for it seems to 
give evidence of a talent for Interpreting in most 
dignified language the homely emotions of man- 
kind which might have drawn the whole world to 
acknowledge Patmore's genius If he could have 
brought himself to exercise It frequently. 

Among the odes of The Unknown Eros there 
is a small group which continues the Impression 
formed by Amelia. These are eminently human in 




i^i^..^^^: 



Coventry Patmore. 

From a sketch for Subject Group by J. S. Sargent, R.A., 1894 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 193 

their character, and deal directly with emotions 
which are within the range of every man's expe- 
rience. The death of the first Mrs. Patmore was 
succeeded In the poet's heart at first by a period of 
feverish despair, In the course of which he was the 
prey of every desolating illusion and every despera- 
tion of unavailing regret. Later on, to this terrible 
tempest of the soul there succeeded a halcyon time 
of peace, a sort of spiritual honeymoon of mem- 
ory and meditation, when he reviewed the incidents 
of his loss no longer with rebellious hopelessness, 
but with gratitude to God and with serenity. It 
was at this time (June 13, 1863) that he wrote a 
memorable letter to Dr. Garnett, in which he was 
able to say that " my first nuptial joy was a poor 
thing compared with the infinite satisfaction I can 
now feel in the assurance, which time has brought, 
that my relation with her is as eternal as it is 
happy." 

It is not in the agony of bereavement but in the 
calmer and less bitter period which follows that an 
artist recurs to incidents of his past anguish and 
gives them the Immortal character of art. We 
have therefore no hesitation in supposing that It 
was in 1863 or 1864 that Patmore composed the 
exquisite odes which deal with Incidents in the last 
illness of his wife. Mr. Basil Champneys has 
traced to the record of a dream in Patmore's jour- 



194 COVENTRY PATMORE 

nal the germ of that experience which Is dealt with 
In " The Azalea":— 

" Aug, 23, 1862. — Last night I dreamt that she 
was dying: awoke with unspeakable relief to find 
that It was a dream; but a moment after to remem- 
ber that she was dead." 

This was six weeks after Emily Patmore's death, 
and we cannot suppose that it was at this time or 
until many months later, that the ode was written. 
It may be Interesting to see In what manner Pat- 
more, when he came to deal with this reflex emo- 
tion In a dream, chose to treat It, especially as 
" The Azalea," being one of the shortest as well 
as the most perfect of his odes, lends itself to 
quotation In full: — 

There, where the sun shines first 

Against our room, 

She trained the gold Azalea, whose perfume 

She, Spring-like, from her breathing grace dispersed. 

Last night the delicate crests of saffron bloom. 

For that their dainty likeness watch'd and nurst, 

Were just at point to burst. 

At dawn I dream'd, O God, that she was dead, 

And groan'd aloud upon my wretched bed. 

And waked, ah, God ! and did not waken her, 

But lay, with eyes still closed, 

Perfectly bless'd in the delicious sphere 

By which I knew so well that she was near, 

My heart to speechless thankfulness composed. 

Till 'gan to stir 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 195 

A dizzy somewhat in my troubled head — 

It was the azalea's breath, and she was dead ! 

The warm night had the lingering buds disclosed. 

And I had fall'n asleep with to my breast 

A chance-found letter press'd, 

In which she said, 

** So, till to-morrow eve, my Own, adieu ! 

Parting's well-paid with *soon again to meet,* 

Soon in your arms to feel so small and sweet. 

Sweet to myself that am so sweet to you 1 " 



This Is a poem scarcely to be read, even for 
the tenth time, without tears, and we can hardly 
find a better example of the combination of several 
of Patmore's finest qualities, the extreme Intensity 
of his emotion, the courage with which he bends 
familiar Images and experiences to his art, and 
the singular distinction of the symbolism which he 
borrows from external nature. Even more har- 
rowing in Its expression of that hopeless longing 
for those who have been taken from us, which the 
ancients knew as desideriiim^ is the longer ode en- 
titled " Departure," in which memory recapitulates 
the actual circumstances of the death of the be- 
loved. This marvellous poem contains an example 
of what used to be called " wit," of strange in- 
verted reflection, which is, to my mind, one of the 
most poignant things In all literature. The lover, 
hanging over the bed of the dear creature whose 



196 COVENTRY PATMORE 

gentleness and thoughtfulness have made her eyes 
" a growing gloom of love,'* then sees her depart 
abruptly. 

With sudden, unintelligible phrase, 

And frighten'd eye. 
Upon her journey of so many days, 

Without a single kiss or a good-bye. 

In the bewilderment of his distress, it Is not the 
endless bereavement that surprises him, but the dis- 
courtesy In one who never failed in the beauty 
of her manners before. He calls out that " it is 
not like her great and gracious ways," and his 
wretchedness is concentrated, for a moment, on the 
bitter disappointment that the only loveless look 
which she ever gave him should be that with which 
she leaves him. To the same category of things 
almost too poignant to be put into words, of fancies 
so sincere and sorrowful that they wring the very 
heart, must be added " The Toys," of which we 
have already spoken: "A Farewell" (where one 
of the vexations of separation is defined, as Words- 
worth and others have defined it, in the inability 
to share emotional experience, so that 

no dews blur our eyes 
To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies) ; 

" If I were Dead " ; and the more mystical, but still 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 197 

very human and direct " Tristltla," which may 
be taken as the poem which hnks this group of 
odes to the austerer numbers of The Unknown 
Eros. 

On the pohtical and satirical odes I do not pro- 
pose to add much to what I have said in a previous 
chapter. Patmore's opinions about pubhc affairs 
were important, I think, for their substance never, 
for their form sometimes. His theory that his 
country was " a corpse simulating life only by the 
exuberance of its corruption " was one which did 
not lend itself to fruitful projects for the future. 
Patmore was one of the most impassioned public 
pessimists who has ever lived; each party was the 
abomination of desolation to him, the Outs being 
only a little better than the Ins because they hap- 
pened to be out. 

Mr. Frederick Greenwood, who had a rare in- 
tuition into Patmore's character and a still rarer 
tact In dealing with It, contrived for a time to In- 
duce him to express. In verse and prose which 
could be printed, his grotesque views on current 
politics. But Patmore himself allowed that the 
newspaper which should print his untutored lucu- 
brations would have to be named Tom d Bedlam, 
The reforms Introduced by Mr. Disraeli in the par- 
liament of 1867 were greeted by Patmore with 
such jubilant Irony as this : — 



198 COVENTRY PATMORE 

In the year of the great crime, 

When the false English Nobles and their Jew, 

By God elemented, slew 

The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong, 

One said. Take up thy song. 

That breathes the mild and almost mythic time 

Of England's prime I 

His friends, excessively alarmed at these prog- 
nostics, entreated him to ^s. for them the date of 
" England's prime," but he was unable to name a 
year. The ode from which these lines are quoted, 
if preposterous as prophecy, contains some noble 
and much vigorous rhetoric. In *' Peace," in 
"1880-1885," and "Crest and Gulf," this quality, 
it must be confessed, occurs more rarely, and the 
poet too often descends to the note of an angry 
scold In the market-place, shrilling ever loudller 
and less intelligibly because no one seems to heed. 
Patmore saw darkly that which he did not see with 
his bodily eyes. His own circle of life, his own 
family, friends and acquaintances were dowered 
with every charm and every virtue, but outside this 
ring he could perceive nothing but what he called 
" the amorous and vehement drift of man's herd 
to hell." Mere invective, especially when directed 
without Insight or examination, to all public parties, 
is very tiresome, and Patmore's political odes are 
scarcely readable after forty years of historical 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 199 

evolution, in spite of the nervous and picturesque 
phrases which abound In them. 

We come, finally, to the large section of the 
odes where Patmore deals. In a spirit of daring and 
profound speculation, with the mysteries of relig- 
ion. In an earlier chapter we have examined the 
conditions under which this magnificent body of 
metaphysical poetry was written. Patmore had be- 
come famous as the poet of wedded love, of the 
exquisite bond which unites woman to man. Now, 
in the maturity of his powers, with a command of 
the instrument such as he had never possessed in 
earlier years, he attempted a sublimer subject, the 
bond which unites the soul to God. St. Francois 
de Sales says that " God, continually taking fresh 
arrows from the quiver of His infinite beauty, 
wounds the soul of His lovers, making them clearly 
perceive that they do not love Him half so much 
as He deserves their love." Patmore had long 
seen that human passion is, or may be treated as, a 
symbol of the divine. His mind had been drawn 
to this parallel even before he became a Catholic, 
and the idea was strengthened in him by the study 
of some of the less mystical fathers, for instance, 
of the sweet and reasonable St. Bernard. Pat- 
more did not consider that renunciation of all 
human pleasure in a monastic life was necessary to 
a high view of spiritual philosophy. On the con- 



200 COVENTRY PATMORE 

trary, as one of the pillars of the Church has said, 
" the innocent captives of marriage may sing the 
songs of Zion in a virginity of heart.'' It was a 
great principle with Patmore that the cell and the 
hair-shirt do not encourage high thought, but that 
the study of divine love may be pushed to the most 
secret recesses of its mystery by those whose daily 
life is made wholesome by legitimate occupations 
and sanctified pleasures. 

The views which Patmore expressed, in highly 
figurative language, in the course of The Unknown 
Eros are fully discussed in his letters, and in the 
prose fragments which Mr. Basil Champneys has 
brought together with such ardent care. Patmore 
interpreted love as " the mystic craving of the 
great to become the love-captive of the small, while 
the small has a corresponding thirst for the en- 
thralment of the great." This metaphor, taken 
from the phenomenon of sex, he expanded in a 
great variety of images and reflections, where the 
Deity was represented as masculine and active, 
and the human soul as feminine and passive. Cole- 
ridge had propounded the formula, the Father is 
thesis, the Son antithesis, the Holy Spirit synthesis. 
Patmore accepted and adapted this to the require- 
ments of his sexual symbolism, defining Godhead 
as thesis. Manhood as antithesis and the Neuter, 
" which is not the absence of the life of sex. 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 201 

but its fulfilment and power/' as synthesis. The 
theory was worked out with extreme boldness 
and fulness in the lost prose treatise, Sponsa Dei, 
which Patmore was unhappily induced to burn in 
1887. 

The metaphor of sex runs through the whole 
of The Unknown Eros^ but is, perhaps, developed 
most clearly in the three Psyche odes, in which 
Indeed Patmore's genius may be said to have cul- 
minated. If we wish to study his metaphysi- 
cal poetry at its most elaborate height of sub- 
tlety and symbol, we should pass at once to these 
poems. 

To analyze would almost be to profane them; 
they are 

Preserving-bitter, very sweet, 
Few, that so all may be discreet. 
And veil'd, that, seeing, none may see. 

They are founded on a favourite doctrine of Pat- 
more's, that the Pagan myths, even when they seem 
gross and earthly, contain the pure elements of liv- 
ing Christian doctrine in symbol. He found 
these elements in such a story as that of Jupiter, 
Hercules, and Alcmena. How much more, then, 
should he find them in the starry legend of Cupid 
and Psyche ? But his interpretation was not merely 
subtle, it was of a burning intensity, and it is not to 



2oa COVENTRY PATMORE 

be supposed that the very elect would be ready to 
embrace It. As a matter of fact, in Patmore's life- 
time the Psyche Odes were not a little of a stum- 
bling-block to all but a few readers, who them- 
selves were apt to feel that they wandered In these 

strophes 

sub luce maligna, 
Inter arundineasque comas, gravidumque papaver, 
Et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos, 

as if in a land where words had lost half their 
meaning and ideas all their definition. It is a 
curious fact that " obscurity '' In literature Is a rela- 
tive thing, and that the world soon learns to see Its 
way through the twilight writers. Wordsworth 
and Tennyson were once thought " obscure," and 
it is only quite recently that people have ceased to 
seem affected If they do not find difficulty In Brown- 
ing. With the key which we now possess, it should 
not be any longer hard to open the casket of Pat- 
more's mystery, although It Is not certain that all, 
or many, will be able to follow the symbolism to its 
extremity without finding that Its audacity 

Stings like an agile bead of boiling gold. 

Patmore was very soon assured of the fact that 
these poems were not welcomed. If understood — 
and least when understood — by a majority of Eng- 
hsh Catholics. He said in one of his letters that he 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 203 

should have to wait for the Invisible Church if he 
desired to be appreciated. In an unpublished letter 
Newman wrote that " I do not like mixing up 
amorousness with religion, since they are two such 
very Irreconcilable elements **; and the scruples of 
the ordinary Catholic found voice In the entreaties 
of Aubrey de Vere that Patmore would moderate 
his ardour and suppress his later poems. De Vere 
was the type of extreme circumspection, who feared 
that Patmore would be " absolutely misunderstood 
through dulness or malignity," and that scandal 
would ensue. De Vere himself was an extremely 
reputable and sensitive Irish bachelor, of subdued 
manners and nice discretion, while the whole arc of 
his gentle experience contained no fact which could 
excuse the ardour of his friend, when, In a blast 
of Incomprehensible religious metaphysics, he burst 
forth with 

Gaze and be not afraid, 

Young Lover true and love-foreboding Maid ; 

The full noon of deific vision bright 

Abashes nor abates 

No spark minute of Nature's keen delight, — 

'Tis there your Hymen waits ! 

But It was thus that Patmore's more ardent 
genius naturally ascended in rapturous communion 
to the Deity, and he could not bend his fiery foot- 
steps to walk in cool, green meadows by the side 



ao4 COVENTRY PATMORE 

of weaker brethren. The fervour of his mystical 
and Catholic poems has been attributed to his ad- 
miration of St. John of the Cross.^ I am ready 
to admit that the pecuhar audacity of the Psyche 
odes, of " Auras of Delight," and of " Sponsa 
Dei " (the poem of that name, beginning " What 
IS this Maiden fair? '*) may owe not a little to the 
encouragement given to the English poet by the 
study of his Spanish precursor's Obras Espirituales, 
but I must record that when. In 1881, I found Pat- 
more absorbed In St. John of the Cross, and turn- 
ing back every other Instant with ecstasy to some 
inexpressible and almost Intolerable rapture, I re- 
ceived the Impression that he had but recently made 
the acquaintance of the Spanish mystic. Yet by 
that time his own line In the evolution of the sex- 
metaphor had long been taken, and many of his 
most characteristic odes had for several years been 
printed. It Is true that he had long been familiar 
with Santa Teresa, whom It seems to me that Pat- 
more resembled not a little In personal character. 
I do not know how It Is that he quotes that " fair 
sister of the seraphim '* so seldom, If at all. In his 

^ Patmore was acquainted with the poems of the great 
Spaniard only in a French prose translation. He would have 
admired, had he lived to read them, the admirable versions, 
in the metre of the original, which Mr. Arthur Symons pub- 
lished in 1902. 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 205 

writings, and I cannot find her name in Mr. 
Champneys' volumes. I recollect, however, Pat- 
more's telling me that Santa Teresa's Road to 
Perfection had exercised upon him a profound im- 
pression. Upon the body of his later poetry, no 
other influences are marked than that of St. John 
of the Cross in respect to matter, and of Milton 
and Spenser, to some faint degree, in respect to 
manner. This last is not to be insisted on. I con- 
fess I see little in later Victorian literature which 
bears the stamp of so much originality, combined 
with such absolute distinction of form, as the best 
of Patmore's religious odes. Their subject, of 
course, must always remove them from popular 
approval, but it is to be conceived that a small 
circle, of those who comprehend, may continue as 
time goes on to contemplate them with an almost 
Idolatrous admiration. 

When Patmore discovered, between 1878 and 
1884, that the faculty for expressing himself freely 
in verse was leaving him, he began to embody his 
Ideas in clear, nervous and aphoristic prose. He 
wrote four small volumes, the first and most brill- 
iant of which, Sponsa Dei, no longer exists. The 
others. Principle in Art (1889), Rdigio Poetae 
( 1 893 ) , and Rod, Root and Flower (1895), con- 
tain in succinct form a summary of what Patmore's 
loves and hatreds, prejudices and inclinations and 



ao6 COVENTRY PATMORE 

illusions, were in the last years of his life. Prin- 
ciple in Art deals mainly with the criticism of 
poetry and architecture, and considerable portions 
of this book had appeared, in one form or another, 
long previously. Religio Poetae covers a wider 
ground, but covers it in a much more fragmentary 
manner, mainly, however, in the direction of prov- 
ing that all subjects may be treated as religion, if a 
man of imagination be the teacher. Rod, Root 
and Flower is written with the violence of a para- 
doxical old man who feels that the end approaches, 
and who lifts his voice that he may be listened to. 
Its golden sayings and brief, unfinished essays will 
be read with delight by those who are attracted 
to the pecuHar spirit of Patmore; to those who 
know him not, they may occasionally seem almost 
insane in their extravagant individualism. The 
author had never cared to meet his weaker brethren 
half-way; now, as Nero is said to have done, he 
invites them to walk in his garden, and darts out 
upon them, dressed like a wild beast, to enjoy their 
terror. The following is an example both of Pat- 
more's latest prose style, and of the hard sayings in 
which his mysticism indulged : — 

" The obligatory dogmata of the Church are 
only the seeds of life. The splendid flowers and 
the delicious fruits are all in the corollaries, which 
few, besides the saints, pay any attention to. 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 207 

Heaven becomes very Intelligible and attractive 
when It Is discerned to be — Woman." 

It was Patmore's theory that the Poet alone has 
the power of so saying the truths which It Is not 
expedient to utter that their warmth and light are 
diffused, while their scorching brilliance remains 
wholly invisible. It Is certain that this theory Is 
a sound one, but he seemed to forget that the pro- 
tection of the poet's word lies In his art, not In him- 
self. Patmore, wrapped In the robe of his dark 
verse, might with Impunity say many things which 
It was not convenient that he should say In open 
prose. But It Is scarcely to be believed that the 
little transcendental essays which form the section 
called " Magna Moralla " in Patmore's latest 
book were not intended to be translated Into the 
nobler order. They seem unfitted. In their present 
shape, to be submitted to us, because incompletely 
executed; or they give us the impression of very 
brilliant prose translations from some foreign mys- 
tic poet. If the reader, for Instance, will examine 
the following passage : — 

" The reconcilement of the highest with the 
lowest, though an Infinite felicity. Is an Infinite sacri- 
fice. Hence the mysterious and apparently unrea- 
sonable pathos in the highest and most perfect satis- 
factions of love. The Bride Is always Amoris 
Victima, The real and Innermost sacrifice of the 



2o8 COVENTRY PATMORE 

Cross was the consummation of the descent of 
Divinity into the flesh and Its identification there- 
with; and the sigh which all creation heaved In 
that moment has Its echo In that of mortal love 
in the like descent. That sigh is the inmost heart 
of all music,'* — he will feel how close Its substance 
is to that of some fragment of The Unknown Eros, 
and he will acknowledge that all It lacks to com- 
plete its beauty and significance is to be clothed In 
such verse as that of " Dellciae Sapientlae," or 
'' Legam Tuam Dllexl." The later prose of Pat- 
more, it appears to me, is not very important ex- 
cept as extending our knowledge of his mind, and 
as giving us a curious collection of the raw material 
of his poetry. 

One valuable Impression, however, we gain from 
a study of Patmore's later prose. We see him as 
the type, in recent English literature of a high 
order, almost the solitary type of absolute faith. 
He was no propagandist; he made no efforts of 
any conspicuous kind to communicate his behef 
to others. It was enough for him to enjoy with 
emphasis his perfect and spontaneous confidence in 
God. He was not touched by curiosity or doubt, 
and positive knowledge, of a scientific kind, was 
without attraction to him. A passage very char- 
acteristic of his captious and sarcastic Indifferentism 
occurs In the ode called " The Two Deserts " : — 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 209 

Not greatly moved with awe am I 

To learn that we can spy 

Five thousand firmaments beyond our own. 

The best that's known 

Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small . . . 

The Universe, outside our living Earth, 

Was all conceiv'd in the Creator's mirth . . . 

Put by the Telescope ! 

Better without it man may see, 

Stretch'd awful tn the hush'd midnight. 

The ghost of his eternity. 

Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye 

The things which near us lie. 

Till Science rapturously hails, 

In the minutest water-drop 

A torment of innumerable tails ; 

These at the least do live. 



Such Speculations, macrocosmic or microcosmic, 
were equally unfitted to attract Patmore's serious 
thought. He lived In a contemplation of eternity, 
and he saw the whole of existence In relation to it. 
There were no softened outlines in his landscape; 
he perceived as he thought, but two things, the 
radiance of truth, crystalline and eternal, and the 
putrescence of wilful and hopeless error. 

The " difficulties " which assail the modern man 
did not approach him. His only trouble was lest 
the flame of love should burn low upon his personal 
altar. Excessive In all things, he lived In an atmos- 



2IO COVENTRY PATMORE 

phere of spiritual glory, haughty, narrow, violent 
In the extravagance of his humility. 

He was all prejudice. In one sense, and yet he 
had. In another, no prejudices. He embraced the 
unexpected In his scheme of Catholic symbolism, 
and In life he was profoundly indifferent to criticism 
of his lines of thought. Strictly orthodox as it was 
his pride to be, those who listened to his conversa- 
tion were often startled by luminous appreciation 
of things which seemed to lie far removed from the 
simplicity of faith. This was because his imagina- 
tion was so candid that each Image and object made 
an entirely new Impression upon it, unaffected by 
conventional tradition. His hatreds were Impul- 
sive and instinctive; he encouraged them because 
he looked upon them as an expression of the force 
with which he repelled evil. If he disliked any- 
thing it must be because it was evil, and he In- 
dulged his hatred as being the very crown of his 
love of good. He had no doubt about the path that 
he was destined to traverse, nor about his lovely and 
sufficient Guide along It. He stood up against the 
world, secure in his faith in God, and in poetry 
which is the handmaiden of God. By a just in- 
tuition, it was as Ezekiel that Mr. Sargent was 
impelled to paint this the latest and fiercest of our 
English prophets. 

It is probably not very unsafe to predict what 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 211 

Patmore's position will be in literary history. He 
does not stand quite in the central stream of the 
age in which he lived. He will not be inevitably 
thought of as representative of the intellect of his 
time, like Tennyson, nor as a spreading human 
force, like Browning, nor as a universal stimulant 
and irritant, like Matthew Arnold. His contribu- 
tions to the national mind will be far less general 
than theirs, mainly because of his curious limita- 
tions of sympathy. Those who do not feel broadly 
may have a deep but they cannot expect to have a 
wide, influence. They cannot suffuse themselves 
into the civilization of the race. The individuality 
of the three poets I have named was soluble, and 
as a matter of fact particles of their substance flow 
already In the veins of every cultivated man. Pat- 
more was narrow, and he was hard ; there Is that in 
his genius which refuses to dissolve. 

Yet there is no reason why his fame should be 
less durable than that of Tennyson and Arnold, 
although it must always be smaller, and of a 
radiance less extended. Star differeth from star 
In magnitude, but a light is not necessarily extin- 
guished because It is of the second species. Pat- 
more will be preserved by his intensity, and by the 
sincerity and economy with which he employed his 
art. Like Gray, like Alfred de Vigny, like Leo- 
pardi (with whom he has several points in com- 



212 COVENTRY PATMORE 

mon), he knew the confines of his strength; he 
strove not to be copious but to be uniformly ex- 
quisite. He did not quite reach his aim, but even 
Catullus has scarcely done that. The peculiar 
beauty of his verse is not to every one's taste; if it 
were he would have that universal attractiveness 
which we have admitted that he lacks. But he 
wrote, with extreme and conscientious care, and 
with impassioned joy, a comparatively small body 
of poetry, the least successful portions of which 
are yet curiously his own, while the most success- 
ful fill those who are attuned to them with an ex- 
quisite and durable pleasure. 

It Is much to his advantage that In a lax age, 
and while moving dangerously near to the borders 
of sentimentality, he preserved with the utmost 
constancy his lofty ideal of poetry. His natural 
arrogance, his solitariness, helped him to battle 
against what was humdrum and easy-going In the 
age he lived In. He was not In any sense a leader 
of men. He lacked every quality which fills others 
with a blind desire to follow, under a banner, any- 
whither, for the mere enthusiasm of fighting. It 
was difficult even to be Patmore's active comrade, 
so ruthless was he In checking every common move- 
ment, so determined was he to be In a protesting 
minority of one. Yet his Isolation, looked at from 
another point of view, was a surprising evidence 



LITERARY POSITION AND AIMS 213 

of his strength, and it is not difficult to believe 
that pilgrim after pilgrim, angry at the excesses 
of the age that is coming, and wild to correct its 
errors, will soothe the beating of his heart by an 
hour of meditation over the lonely grave where 
Coventry Patmore lies, wrapped for ever in the 
rough habit of the stern Franciscan order. 



THE END. 



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